Sunday, 28 June 2009

Celebrities - social objects or fake friends?

With the prominent celebrity deaths this week flooding our many publics, friends are pushing back. Doc writes:

obsessing about celebrity is unhealthy for the single reason that it is also unproductive. Celebrity is to mentality as smoking is to food. (I originally wrote “chewing gum” there, but I think smoking is the better analogy.) It is an unhealthy waste of time.

Mary responds:

Michael Jackson and other celebs are the replacement for that sort of seriously time consuming difficult religion, because media and post-modernism make it easy [...] If nothing is more important than the individual, but he/she needs to follow something bigger than the self [...] you have the perfect primordial soup to grow the MJ, etc worship replacing organized religion we see now.

I think there are two other components to this - celebrities function both as Jyri's Social Objects the cultural touchstones and shared ideas that we use to bridge our publics, as I have said:

The small number of highly-connected entities that fulfil the role of social objects are sometimes people. If you think about celebrities, they clearly fit- being able to discuss Brad and Jen and Angelina's latest shenanigans binds you in, and shows like American Idol are designed to draw on this need, giving the Faustian bargain of fame in exchange for objectification.

This week, research was published confirming this:

"The very experts who could kind of inform everyone else don't. They actually keep feeding them the information they already know because that helps establish a connection," Nathanael Fast says.

If this whole argument seems circular, that's the point. Prominent people stay popular for longer than they ought to because they serve as conversational fodder, which in turn drives more media coverage.

"Take Paris Hilton, somehow or another she became well known and now people are more likely to talk about her," Fast says.

This supports Duncan Watts's experimental work on self-feeding fame.

But there is another component to this as well - that we perceive celebrities as part of our social group - they take up one of the slots we have available for modelling and keeping track of other people. My first experience of this was when I worked at BBC Elstree, and said hi to some oldish chap I recognised in the corridor, later realising that he didn't know me at all - he was Arthur from EastEnders. (Now I've done a bit of public speaking this happens to me in reverse now and then - people who've seen me speak somewhere later on come and say hello, remembering it as a conversation). danah's classic Fakesters discussion touches on this too, with Friendster's symmetric Dunbar assumptions confounded by users wanting to connect through the famous; whereas MySpace and especially Twitter have embraced the fundamental asymmetry of who pays attention to whom in this way.

My take is that while Doc is right about the time-sink of celebrity for it's own sake, which may be an example of losing a useful person-slot to a synthetic creation. Mary's implication that there is a God-slot there is perhaps supported by Robert Wright's argument that the God as human-like role model can have good influences on us.

Certainly, being aware of our own choices of 'fake friends' to act as role models is likely to be better than having to choose them from a limited 20th century media model.

6 comments:

  1. Hi Kevin,
    I think the fake friends/ social objects theory is right up to a point. But it doesn't account for the tremendous time people put into celebrity worship, or the raising up of celebs and then the attempts to associate yourself with the celeb. For many the time sink can vastly outweigh the time put into the rest of one's real social experience.

    It's one thing to have a celeb as a social object we can all discuss, it's another to stretch it to "i'm associated with them," to be obsessed with the fame and the nearness one might have (autographs, sightings, objects produced by the celeb, even actions taken at their direction like the Demi/Ashton donation efforts which use this energy of the masses for good, etc.)

    I think the social object idea only goes so far in explaining how much time and effort people put into this stuff, and how strongly they need to lift up and self associate with that which is lifted up in fame.

    I think humans are, in immature form, prone to put things up above us, or down below, and organized religion used to give structure to that tendency, no matter how immature it is. As we get older, grow a bit, we realize that superficial things aren't bigger or higher than our own selves, and things we disliked for silly reasons aren't beneath us. There is balance, the world has shades of grey, and personal connection is most real and important in our social experience.

    The question i still have is why people need to be near the famous, why they want to be famous themselves, when it's all so false? Why can't they see that falseness? And why would they want to put themselves further into a false realm when it's going away from that world that would bring them deeper connections and experience?

    Currently my only answer is that fear maintains a stronger hold than the healthiness of real connection and therefore the need to have a celeb be counted as a social counterpart, to be worshiped, to be held up, keeps people from having to see the deeper reality of their lives. And as Doc says, it's a lovely distraction from reality that has terribly unproductive consequences.

    Mary

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  2. Good stuff from both of you.

    I would add that the choice to associate with celebrity, or a more formal association, such as a ball club, has the generally harmless effect of giving one membership in something. I now, for example, belong to "Red Sox Nation," as they call it in Boston. These may also be examples of granfalloons, which Kurt Vonnegut defined as "proud and meaningless associations of human beings."

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  3. I have been okay with the massive MJ coverage. His talent is genuine.

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  4. We were in a bus yesterday to a bunch of pretty teenage girls and their adult chaperone, who had just arrived by plane in Los Angeles from George, presumably to do tourist things in the city. When we mentioned that more than a million people applied for tickets to Michael Jackson's funeral, they all said they wished they had applied too. "It's so sad," one of them said.

    I think what we're dealing with here is fandom. People are loyal to individual celebrities the same way they're loyal to sports clubs and favorite players. Some of this comes from genuine appreciation for the unique values those individuals bring to the world. I feel that way myself about many individuals, in technology, business, sports and other fields.

    But obsession with celebrity for its own sake, which was the subject of my blog post, is a different thing. I believe a lot of that has to do with a kind of half-minded churn. Covers of supermarket tabloids now treat the Obamas as celebrities. Barack has secret meetings with Muslims, one says. Michelle has an enemies list, another says.

    This is a popular form of spam. It's a scam and a come-on. But some people, lots of them, take it seriously. Or seriously enough. My case is, Yeah, but it's still a waste of time and energy. It is, as Shakespeare put it, "full of sound and fury, signifying nothing." I also believe that, since nothing does less than something -- and since there are more somethings to do than ever, thanks to the Net (and each other), the nothing-doings of the world will have ever less leverage.

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  5. I am enjoying this thread v. much.

    As such, it seemed a McLuhan-esque/Marxist angle could be fun here. Aren't celebrities simply commodities? They offer us direction, something to consume, as well as the ability to fly far beyond our immediate contexts. Of course, we need to remember our Icarus-like desires and not fly too close to the sun, right?

    Lisa Belkin wrote yesterday in the NYT magazine: "Talking about others is our way to test the social boundaries — to learn what raises eyebrows, what is met by shrugs — without directly talking about ourselves." In this sense celebrities and celebrity gossip allows us to establish cultural norms. We can talk, compare notes, in the comfort of our homes, and hopefully lean something in the process without directly commenting on our own personal conditions and addictions.

    Perhaps, though, we might benefit from talking more about our selves than others, which, am told, Twitter supports pretty handily.

    Thank you again for offering this conversation.

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  6. http://blog.famebook.com/famebook/2009/03/twitter-breaks-down-the-wall-between-star-and-fans-what-a-nightmare.html

    imho

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