How easy is it to tell immortal fame from ephemeral celebrity?

Try to force your own tastes in greatness on later generations, and you risk the fate of most Victorian statues: merely a convenient latrine for any passing pigeon

The Celebrity Big Brother 2016 eye logo (Channel 5)

Apart from the fourth plinth and its temporary artworks, whose statues adorn the corners of Trafalgar Square? Don’t worry: I had no idea either. Fame is a fickle business, and granite or bronze alone can never blackmail posterity into remembering names or deeds. Millions hurry past George IV (on a horse), Sir Charles Napier and Sir Henry Havelock without a second glance. If George just about survives in national myth as a fat and randy hedonist, then the Indian exploits of the generals who stand guard with him have dropped into uttermost oblivion. Perhaps justly: both specialised in crushing rebellions. In time, some offshoot of the “Rhodes Must Fall” campaign might turn their monument-toppling wrath on the brutes who keep Nelson company.

In words as much as stone or metal, the Victorians placed bets on the future with all the breezy assurance of investors who believed that the bull market in their reputations could never run out of steam. Many of those punts on posterity ended in bombastic irrelevance. A few of their bids for immortality – or at least endurance – did flourish, and do now.

Edited by Leslie Stephen, the first volume of the Dictionary of National Biography appeared in January 1885. It marked the opening chapter in an epic, 130-year project to record the lives of people who made a significant contribution to life in Britain, from Julius Caesar to Max Bygraves. The dictionary aimed not to build a patriotic pantheon of heroes, nor compile a dry gazetteer of defunct office-holders, but to compose a reliable, panoramic portrait of the people who shaped the nation’s life. It still does.

In due course, Stephen – a former Cambridge don, Alpine mountaineer and all-round man-of-letters – had his own renown eclipsed by that of his daughters: Vanessa Bell and Virginia Woolf. The latter regretted (in Three Guineas) that there were “no lives of maids” in the magnum opus her father brought to birth. His brainchild, however, grew and prospered. It also changed, so that the servant class – or anyway, their upwardly-mobile offspring – began to rub posthumous shoulders with generals, bishops, statesman and professors.

On Thursday, the latest online supplement of the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography went live with entries for 222 figures who died in 2012. When, in 2004, a completely revised edition of the dictionary came to fruition in joint print and online versions under the historian Colin Matthew’s editorship, its 60 dead-tree volumes cost £7,500. Now, membership of a public library will give anyone free online access to the entire virtual vault – and remotely, too. That would have thrilled the young Virginia Stephen.

She would be eager to know that 48 new arrivals are female, and that the proportion of women in recent amendments runs at 25-30 per cent. Beyond the January intake for those who died three years earlier, two other annual updates rescue overlooked figures from the more distant past – many of them women. As for the obituary class of 2012, it contains, as far as I can tell, no maids, but plenty of female reformers – from Ann Dummett to Wendy Greengross – who campaigned against poverty, prejudice and discrimination. Woolf would surely greet with fiercely mixed feelings the information that the latest-born figure lived by her words and, in a sense, died for them: the foreign correspondent Marie Colvin, born in 1956 and killed during Syria’s civil war.

If the dictionary’s 59,879 entries try to steer clear of transient celebrity, they do not any longer shun the sort of widespread fame that sheds light on an evolving society. Take the 2012 team, gathered into the fold under the current general editor, Sir David Cannadine. Not only Max Bygraves but Patrick Moore, Davy Jones (of The Monkees), Dinah Sheridan, Clive Dunn, Eric Sykes, Gerry Anderson (Thunderbirds), Daphne Oxenford (the voice of Listen with Mother), darts ace Jocky Wilson, darts commentator Sid Waddell and gang leader Charlie Richardson make the cut. So do a larger legion of scientists, medics, activists and business people whose fame never spread far beyond their own households, but who left enough of a trace to satisfy the dictionary’s 45 panels of specialist selectors.

Those 222 newcomers represent, the ONDB’s senior research and publication editor Dr Philip Carter tells me, “the consequences of a sifting process that began with around 1,000 that could potentially be included”. The infinite storage capacity of digital publishing did not tempt the dictionary to loosen its criteria: the rate of additions has not skyrocketed. Carter stresses the importance of “the people you’ve never heard of” – the computer scientists, the structural engineers, the education officers – as much as the stars, politicians and “personalities”.

The dictionary aims “to maintain its position as a record of those who’ve shaped national life, as opposed to an uncurated collection of people for whom a biography could be written”. He cites two architects, both 2012 departures whose careers chart the rise and fall of progressive modernism in Britain: Isi Metzstein from Glasgow, whose pioneering St Peter’s seminary in Cardross now lies in ruins; and John Madin, the rebuilder of central Birmingham in brutalist concrete. Metzstein came to Britain as a child refugee from Nazism on a Kindertransport train – part of a notable cohort of inter-war émigrés from tyranny and strife who left us in 2012. They range from the aforementioned Sheridan to writers Eva Figes and Gitta Sereny, historians Eric Hobsbawm and SS Prawer, and scientists Fritz Ursell and Martin Fleischmann.

No age can draw firm lines between ephemeral celebrity, solid fame and long-term renown, and then expect the future to respect them. Try to force your own tastes in greatness on later generations, and you risk the fate of most Victorian statues: merely a convenient latrine for any passing pigeon. Yet know-nothing relativism fails to honour the past, or satisfy the present. Almost half a century has passed since Andy Warhol introduced an exhibition in Sweden with the dictum that “In the future, everyone will be world-famous for 15 minutes.”

Now, reality-show stunts such as Celebrity Big Brother (which resumed this week) drive the Warholian definition of renown down into sub-microscopic particles. Today’s Lilliputian lordlings are not just well-known for being well-known, but for knowing the well-known. You might have heard of the new house-mates Nancy Dell’Olio, Angie Bowie and David Gest: comparative mega-stars in CBB terms. The latest batch of tenants, though, features Jonathan Cheban, apparently a friend of Kim Kardashian. For such dwarf stars, “micro-celebrity” hardly does the job. How about “nano-celebrity”?

The Warholian dream of equal fame has given way to a nightmare overload of trivia. When everyone’s a star, nobody is. Yet the age of open-access glory has also ushered in the chance for talented outsiders to shine – not so much in mainstream television as on the virtual stage of YouTube and social media.

For the class of 2012, the ODNB editors decided – and rightly so – that the cult of TV darts embodied by Wilson and Waddell had deep enough roots in British life to justify their choice. For that pair, fame’s arrow struck in a three- or four-channel world. Pity the dictionary’s arbiters of 2066 or 2086, charged with adjudicating the claims of a numberless swarm of vloggers, e-book chart-toppers, bedroom guitar wizards, online evangelists and webcam philosophers.

Some, no doubt, will last. A handful may re-shape Britain to a degree that compels recognition in the dictionary’s great book of judgment. Still, those 45 panels of scholarly winnowers will have their work cut out.

Like so much else in the information age, biography has shifted from an economy of scarcity to one of super-abundance. When you can discover almost anything about anyone at the swipe of a screen or the click of a mouse, reputations need judicious curating as much as any other commodity.

Such selectivity need not mean elite exclusion. Quite the opposite: with its curiosity about the unsung, backroom champions of innovation, research and reform, the ONDB now looks less like the gentlemen’s club frequented by its founders than a democratic forum where the meaning of the nation changes via an ever-growing cast. Beyond its 11,500 expert contributors, the dictionary also gathers information from a host of non-professional sleuths, often at work in the fast-developing fields of women’s, local and family history. As Philip Carter makes plain: “We depend very heavily on the goodwill of individuals.”

In the epoch of infinite data, many people hunger for the kind of institution that balances authority with accessibility. Neither a chaotic free-for-all nor a patrician closed shop, a venture such as the dictionary challenges both the flash-in-the-pan narcissism of Celebrity Big Brother and the rigid hierarchies of rank, role and gender reflected in Victorian monuments. No one can strongarm the future.

Some hallowed figures from this latest supplement may eventually look as antiquated as Napier, Havelock and the uniformed throwbacks who hog our urban spaces. Still, all deserve their even-handed memorials – in bytes, if not in bronze.

Meanwhile, Virginia Woolf would be delighted to learn that the ODNB records the life of her namesake Jessie Stephen, “suffragette and labour activist”: the mutinous Glasgow maid who founded the Scottish Federation of Domestic Workers and sabotaged pillar boxes while wearing her apron and cap.