Hot Celebrity Gossip!

Johnathon Gould

24 October 2009

Our age isn't unique in promoting folks who are famous just for being famous. In the Depression, northern Americans followed avidly the doings of Brenda D.D. Go back a century and you find folks wondering intently what new sort of overcoat Viscount Petersham would wear this year. Earlier still, King Richard the Lionheart enjoyed great recognition among a peasantry whose only contact with him was paying his punitive taxes. And, naturally, the Caesars provided all Europe with the necessary aspects of celebrity : power, madness, sexual excess, violence, and good grooming. Interest in gossip about the wealthy and famous is a universal human quality -- and not just human. Other primates are in a similar fashion obsessed with the lifestyles of top clan members. Dominance and breeding fitness are crucial things for a primate to understand, because they help establish the subject's own opportunities and hazards. Any monkey who can't tune in to the local social structure is going to miss out, not just on the gossip, but on the opportunity to survive and reproduce. So when the media tells us that someone is hot ( or rich, or influential ), we can't help but reply : we wish to know, because we want to feel attached to power in this, our world clan. The issue with celebrity, though , is that it's an one-way relationship.

It's the scale of most peoples's Xmas card lists, or the quantity of Facebook buddies who actually are mates. Beyond 150, new buddies just shade off into the mass -- we do not actually know them. This implies that the more attention you pay to Kevin Federline, the more probable he's to take up one of those 150 places -- and the less certain that place is to be occupied by a potential real chum who would also know you.

Celebrity hijacks our social instinct, designed for getting along in tiny groups, and ties it to fundamentally empty imaginings of a fictitious relationship. We all know so much about the great that we are able to simply imagine ourselves hobnobbing with them -- which may make real life seem unacceptable in comparison. Bad as this is for us adults, it's far worse for kids : a kid whose chums are all media figures is basically more lonesome than one whose pals are hypothetical.