Why the hell is it important what X star did to Y famous person, what the name of their baby or dog is, what their house looks like, who they’re going out with, who or what they’re wearing?
Who cares? Do people really hunger for nationwide gossip? Isn’t this sort of crap completely responsible for the deplorable paparazzi industry?
I agree with the sentiment, but your OP doesn’t seem to rise to the level of a Pitting.
But you’re a guest, so maybe it will slide.
Does this mean you don’t want any more pictures of Britney’s coochie?
Marc
Interesting premise to a dull OP. Tell me, how does this affect Paris Hilton?
And are you intimating that the “vital” (and ongoing) coverage of the tragic demise of Anna Nicole Smith is unimportant?
Short answers to the OP: it generally isn’t, lots of people, yes, and yes.
Welcome to the board.
Usually I couldn’t care less about the quotidian level celebrity news (from the OP- baby names or particularly what they’re wearing [I couldn’t tell a Versace from a Wal-Mart clearance bin]), but I’ll admit the Anna Nicole business has caught my interest. Certainly not to the level it has Larry King’s or others- I’m just interested in updates and don’t give a damn what her grandmother’s gynecologist or her former housekeeper’s psychoanalyst has to impart- but the basics of the case. You have to admit the whole business of mysterious deaths of beautiful people, baby of unknown paternity, geezer billions, hangers on, etc., has some appeal as a morbid morality play.
I think it’s essentially because we all have a voyeur streak and celebrities are safe. We can gossip about them and not have to worry about offending or having to face them, plus they’re standardized: I don’t have neighbors interesting or well known enough to kvetch about to people who live in Montreal, Pasadena, Des Moines, or Charleston, but everybody knows who Tom Cruise or Robert Blake or Clay Aiken is and so as we move to the virtual world it takes the part of gossiping with the back fence neighbor about someone we both “know”. They’re the new version of the weird people in the big house on the corner and a hell of a lot richer, more colorful, more interesting, and better documented, something like royalty or characters from the Bible used to be.
I think that’s part of it.
Also, I think we’re wired to care about and want to find out about the people we see regularly: what they’re up to, what kind of trouble they’re in, etc. However, this instinct evolved long before the mass media came along, when the “people we see regularly” were our families and neighbors. Nowadays, we see so much of them that we’ve been tricked into thinking of celebrities as our neighbors.
Agreed. News about thousands of people dying in the Sudan over the past four years doesn’t make good fodder for water cooler gossip, so it barely rates a mention. The rest is infotainment.
Sadly, yes. Millions of 'em.
Go read *Moving Pictures * by Terry Pratchett. If celebrity gossip gets you wound up, you’ll love it.
Hate to break it to you Robot, but your fellow humans are by and large fuckwits. Celebriturd ‘news’ is the new Opiate of the Masses, right behind deep fried starch foods and bad beer. Read a book and feel smug.
Generally, watching the major news networks isn’t a very good way of becoming informed about any given subject. Think of it more like going to the zoo and watching the monkeys.
We can’t help it. It’s in our nature. A recent study (no, it’s the Pit so I won’t look it up) showed that monkeys would rather look at pictures of the dominant member of their troop than eat. To explain why CSPAN isn’t more popular the researcher pointed out that monkeys rule with behavior that, in a human, can only be described as “diva.” All show; lots of preening and yelling. Like a celebrity.
Following up on what dropzone and others have said, this is a hard-wired element of human psychology. It used to serve a legitimate social purpose, back when our circle of acquaintances was limited to those with whom we could physically interact, but in our modern era of mass communications this ancient predilection is being triggered and manifesting in truly bizarre ways.
The short version goes like this:
We recognize a social hierarchy. We recognize that there are people above us, status-wise, and below us. However, while we may superficially abide by these rankings, we are always open to opportunities to pull down the people above us, that we may rise, and to hold down those below us, that we may not descend. Gossip, which is to say little stories about other people’s behavior, is one of the primary tools we use to enforce, and occasionally manipulate, the social order. For example, if we can spread a story that our slightly-higher-status neighbor was, say, a drunk with a gambling problem, we might be able to trade places with him on the status ladder. From ancient times, therefore, we were highly attuned to collecting information about other people, especially those above us, because it could potentially prove useful. And we still are, though our hard-wired interest in accumulating intelligence on our social superiors has become, to some extent, divorced from its original purpose, because celebrities and others of much higher rank are so distant from us as to live in what is for all practical purposes a different world. And yet we continue to have a powerful interest in them, and especially their crimes and peccadillos, because we are behaviorally programmed to be that way.
It’s obviously a lot more complicated than that, but even the simplified version is illuminating.
(My primary source for this is the chapter “Inference Systems in the Social Mind” in the book Religion Explained by Pascal Boyer, and to a lesser extent the book Intimate Strangers: The Culture of Celebrity by Richard Schickel. The first is highly recommended reading.)
Listening to CNN the other day, I heard Anna Nichole Smith described as a model and professional celebrity.
A Professional celebrity? WTF?
And, unfortunately I get tons of this shit. Seems that the small time in the morning that I have to watch the news always falls in the entertainment segment. WHY is America so caught up in the American idol crap.
It’s not our exclusive nature. I purposefully don’t own a television. Can you believe it? I couldn’t even name four television series’ currently airing. The ones I can name are due to peripheral conversation. What really grinds me are the people who feel the compulsion to touch celebrities at a concert or sporting match; or have their signature on a piece of paper.
Whoa! Whoa! Whoa! Let’s not take this contempt for worshipping too far.