Hello cmason32 - you watched Oprah this week, didn’t you! She had those Hilton creatures on her show the other day & it pissed me off so severely I went to her message boards to complain (you will never find a more wretched hive of poor punctuation, limited vocabulary and grammatical errors). And while a substantial number of posters shared my view, there were quite a few objections along the lines of “oh, you’re just jealous - don’t pass judgement”. WTF???
The thing is - why do the human chow of this world insist on imbuing idiots like the Hiltons with noble qualities? Why grant them the right to suck up vast resources? Why pay any attention to them at all? Obviously Cervaise is correct - but why, in this day and age?
I could see how capitalist success stories would sing their praises for winning the game in which they themselves have invested heavily (figured TaxGuy would take that stance). But I don’t see why people at the bottom of the heap (which is how the poorly spoken appear to me, anyway) rush to their defense. So there’s something good about working as a Hilton housekeeper for $6/hour so those girls can afford to live luxurious lives?
I won’t argue for an egalitarian society, but there’s more than one reason why the gap between rich and poor in this country has increased dramatically. Ordinary people are letting it happen.
eh. I don’t refuse to participate: I merely don’t. Refusal would be an acknowledgement of the fact that I had urges to participate in the first place. The fact that I don’t is evidence that at least some do not need these type of figures.
county wrote:
On the surface, the first sentence has some truth, but merely not giving 2 shits about it, without even having to go so far as to “refuse” to participate, is not participation.
I see it as an acknowledgement of it, but not a celebration. After all, you dont revel in everything you hate :eek:
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I went to school with S. I. Newhouse IV for a brief time (at Haverford). We were both on the fencing team. He’s a nice guy, from what I know.
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Part of our fascination with celebrities might originate in our desire to be rich and famous ourselves (maybe more the latter–lottery winners don’t often become idolized.) In the case of negative examples, the fascination can be a sort of schadenfrude. Anyway, we like to gape and wonder at “the beautiful people”
There’s a line between fandom and obsessive fandom. Saying, “I’m a big fan of Charlie Smith” usually means “I have all his CD’s and his music speaks to me”, not “OMG he is so wonderful and hot he should leave his girlfriend for me and we’ll live happily ever after blah blah blah”. Those who subscribe to the second theory are the ones who have no “life” and can be unbalanced.
Does anyone else find it intensely ironic that the message boards of someone like Oprah (who extolls the virtues of reading books so much) should be a trainwreck of grammar and punctuation? It only confirms (for me) how thin the veneer of culture is in the talk show circuit. Just one more good reason to have left my television off for some years now. I suppose I should be very, very glad to not really know who the Hilton sisters are (save for their mention at these boards) nor recognize many of the names mentioned in this thread. What a relief.
I also agree that this thread neither celebrates these drooling idiots nor signifies authentic participation in the culture of celebrity. Never have I seen such a crop of talentless individuals with so overweening a sense of entitlement as the current harvest of performers and “celebrities” dotting our cultural landscape.
I didn’t see the Oprah show (I never watch it). Instead, I was flipping through the channels and VH1 had on “The Fabulous Life Of … The Hilton Sisters.”
I see where you’re coming from, however I really don’t think the average American is obsessed with celebrities. Do any of us demand to get a nightly update on the status of Ben and J.Lo’s relationship? No. But if we watch t.v., or read a magazine, or listen to the radio, it is forced down our throat. Hell, you couldn’t even watch the baseball playoffs without hearing about them.
So I don’t believe it is US who need to give it a rest with the celebrity adulation. I think it’s the MEDIA who needs to cool it. They have become insatiable and obnoxious. And not just with the celebrity stalking thing. I mean, I feel for Lacy Peterson and Chandra Levy’s families, but the amount of saturation these stories received was absolutely ridiculous.
Maybe, maybe not. But what has that do do with electronic celebrity, which itself seems to do little more than sell non-essential consumerables (sic).
I don’t see celebrity as relevant to any kind of hierarchy in my life at all. Instead, I see celebrity purely as a marketing tool. Everything else is self-generated fantasy nonsense.
And I don’t understand your notion of celebrity and “status”, they’re sales people who’ve turned selling into a superficial life-style. Period.
Dead-on, Lisa. Come on, dopers, how many of you will watch TV and be subject to a whole stream of information you just don’t care about. SMBDohphiles might be just a bit more sophsiticated than average joes (except, of course, for…well, why get into that…) but I think most Americans give little thought to the celeb of the week.
Gotta go, Paris is faxing me from her fabulous villa in Guernica…
How dare you make such statements! You should be ashamed of yourself. For millions of dollars a year, these benevolent souls sacrifice the peacefulness and privacy the rest of us take for granted. And they do it 24/7, 365 days a year. There are no “day offs” for celebrities. Those bottles of Cristal aren’t going to pour themselves on a stripper’s ass, you know? Someone has to do it, and I don’t see you putting in the time.
Celebrities are doing a public service. They show us all how unimportant we are. They’re better than us and they deserve our praise. I think they should be congratulated for letting their celebrity status branch out into things that aren’t just the traditional stage and screen fare. Is the world not a better place for the creation of StarDates?
If celebrities didn’t care, if they didn’t “give a shit” about us, then why would they create an industry to give our lives meaning? Why would they take our money? These people wouldn’t be able to sleep at night if they took our money and didn’t care about us.
You need to think about what you said. You might want to consider apologizing. God help us if a celebrity were to see that and lose respect for the non-celebrity class of the country.
In a free market system, the media supply what the people want, period. If it doesn’t secure television ratings or sell magazines, they stop doing it. If it increases ratings or sells more magazines, they do more of it. End of story.
Barbara Walters is supposedly a respected journalist (or at least she used to be). But her ratings triple and quadruple when she does an interview with Gwyneth Paltrow or George Clooney as compared to when she talks to a “legitimate” news figure like Colin Powell.
It’s all about supply and demand, and for whatever reason there is a very high demand most of the time. Even so, if the demand isn’t there, the media are powerless to “force it down our throats.” That reality show I’m a Celebrity, Get Me Outta Here was about the most naked attempt to appeal to this phenomenon as I’ve seen in recent years, but because they got third- and fourth-tier celebrities, they couldn’t generate any interest, and the show didn’t do very well. Basically, in this system, people have the power to say no, and they do. But I guarantee you that if the producers of that show had somehow managed to get Jim Carrey, Madonna, Renee Zellweger, Will Smith, and the like, instead of Cris Judd, Maria Conchita Alonso, Robin Leach, and Bruce Jenner, the show would have been a smash hit.
The combined circulation of People, Us, The Star, The National Enquirer, and other celebrity-oriented publications is several orders of magnitude larger than the combined circulation of The New York Times, U.S. News and World Report, The Economist, and the other “serious” publications. Time Magazine sells many times more copies from the newsstand when its cover shows a celebrity like Michael Jackson, or a bullshit celebrity scandal like the O.J. trial, than when it’s a current-events cover like the election or a social issue like mass transit or the environment. For crying out loud, People is still coming up with excuses to put Princess Diana on the cover because they know people will buy those issues.
You don’t believe me? You want some actual numbers? This may be the Pit, which is not known for frequency of citation, but the point is too important to overlook, so try this on for size. Bolded emphasis is mine.
Who, precisely, is forcing us to buy these things? And more importantly, how?
Look: Complain all you want about the phenomenon. I’ll agree with you. I am just as irritated as anybody that through sheer media osmosis it’s impossible for me to be ignorant of not just the fact that Uma Thurman and Ethan Hawke recently split up, but the reasons behind it. A, I don’t care, and B, it’s none of my business. And yet, for whatever reason, people in general are interested in this stuff enough to create a demand such that this kind of information becomes cultural background noise. I do what I can to ignore it, but I’m resigned to the reality.
And I don’t blame the media. As demonstrated above, they give us what we want. I don’t mean us as in you and me, since we’ve expressed such distaste for the phenomenon. You might try to suggest that this applies to the SDMB collectively, given its bias towards facts and rationality— but I would argue with you. For example, the recent thread “Ben Dumps Jen For Good” got 78 responses and 2086 views. By SDMB standards, that’s a pretty successful thread. When the news broke that the Bennifer wedding had been postponed, there were like half a dozen threads within an hour. Clearly, the mass media came into all of our houses, held guns to our heads, and forced us to post on the subject. Right? Right? Right.
In my opinion, people who blame the media for this phenomenon are attempting to deny something ugly and unpleasant about human nature. The undeniable bottom line is, if pictures of Jennifer Aniston sunbathing topless in her back yard didn’t sell magazines, nobody would be climbing onto the neighbor’s roof with a telephoto lens. Period. The fact is, those pictures do sell. We are inarguably fascinated with the private lives of celebrities. The question of whether Kevin Spacey is gay, for example, comes up repeatedly on the boards (asamplingforyou). Why? Again, I ask, who is forcing us to think and write about it? Or whether or not Courtney Love is a coked-up skank? Or what Winona Ryder was doing in that shop? Or why Ashton Kutcher and Demi Moore hooked up?
Who gives a shit?
We give a shit.
Again, not we as in you and me personally. We as in the American public. We watch the TV shows. We buy the magazines and the tabloids, in massive, massive quantities. And the machine is more than happy to give us exactly what we want. If we didn’t want it, they wouldn’t offer it.
As human beings, we are naturally voyeuristic; we will look at something if we believe it’s safe to do so without someone looking back at us. We cheerfully crane our heads when passing wrecks on the freeway, but we get uncomfortable if one of the victims looks back at us and sees us looking; we may even get irrationally angry that by doing so they have “taken away our right to look” or something equally stupid. Modern media feed this need, but it did not create it. When Lucy Lawless is at a public event, and her dress slips and her boob pops out and somebody takes a picture and puts it on the internet, who is forcing us to click on the link? When Nick Nolte’s wild-haired mug shot is made available at The Smoking Gun, which member of the mass media is grabbing our hand, moving our mouse, and pushing down our collective finger to go check it out?
And I repeat that we as hierarchy-oriented primates are hardwired to find the “important” people fascinating and relevant to our lives. Five hundred years ago, The Man Everybody Knows was the head of the village, and it made sense to organize our lives around him. It was an ingrained, natural part of human behavior, and it worked to keep the tribe structured and functional. But five hundred years is an eyeblink, evolutionarily speaking, so now The Man Everybody Knows includes a shrill, hairy-backed comic whose hallmark is crazy improvisation and whose drug-soaked past is a thing of legend, plus a golden-haired, lissome goddess whose tennis skills are decidedly secondary to her photogenic form, plus a carefully sloppy overweight man-of-the-people gadfly whose talent for saying outrageously quotable things on television takes precedence over his ability to keep his facts straight; and so on, and so forth. It seems ridiculous for us to organize our lives around these people, but we don’t decide to do it consciously; it happens by instinct because that’s who we are.
The cult of celebrity will not stop until the population at large decides to stop taking what the media are offering, which will force the television producers and the magazine publishers to give us something else in order to stay in business. They do not force us to buy or watch anything. We, collectively, buy and watch what interests us, and the corporations measure it with an extreme degree of accuracy, shrug their shoulders, and give us more of what we want.
Blaming the media for who we are is a comfortable bit of denial, and a completely understandable attempt to deny something dark and ugly about human nature and shift the guilt elsewhere— but it’s denial all the same.
Cervaise, If your point is that more people are interested in hearing Gwynyth Paltrow’s love life than Colin Powell’s, then I agree with you 100%. However, I’d argue that that has more to do with political AVERSION than celebrity adulation. People don’t give a crap about day to day politics in this country. Is that what is really bothering you? Well, welcome to America: home of Political Apathy and Cynicism. FYI, CSI, ER, Friends, and Monday Night Football consistently outrank fluffy celebrity shows.
Except that the media is not a free market commodity. Never has been. It’s a subsidized commodity. Either the government or charitable foundations foots the bill for the program (shows such as Sesame Street, Market Place, and Nova) or corporate America pays for ads for shows that they think their target audience will want to see. If a certain show doesn’t attract enough 18-40 year old viewers, for instance, it will be off the air no matter how popular it is with seniors, not because there’s not enough demand for it, but because the advertisers don’t care about the demands of their non-target audience.
I disagree. Truly, do you know ONE PERSON who was interested in hearing about the Chandra Levy case past, oh, day 2363? If you turned on the cable box at any time during the months preceding 9/11 you were given news on that wretched woman’s disappearance EVERY SINGLE NIGHT OF THE WEEK. You couldn’t escape it, if you tried. In fact, there was a pit thread or five devoted to the media saturation. Why was the media so obsessed with her? Because they had 24 hours a day to fill up with “news.” Used to be we had a half hour of national / international news a night. We now get 100 times that because of the proliferation of cable show such as CNN, CNN Headline, CNBC, FoxNews, CourtTV, etc. And, as a result, viewership on ALL stations, including network t.v. has gone DOWN, not up.
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Before you despair too much, consider this: Wheel of Fortune got almost twice as many viewers (9.0) as Entertainment Tonight (5.2) this past week. More people would rather watch a stranger trying to solve a word puzzle than want to watch the latest on J.Lo and Ben Affleck.
