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.

Digital publics, Conversations and Twitter

Last week, I left the Web 2.0 conference to listen to Mimi Ito, danah boyd and their colleagues talk about their research on Digital Publics.

Now if you haven't been paying attention, that plural of 'public' there may throw you. Surely things are either 'public' or 'private'? As danah explains:

Just as context is destabilized through networked publics, so is the meaning of public and private. What I learned from talked to teens is that they are living in a world where things are "public by default, private when necessary." Teens see public acts amongst peers as being key to status. Writing a public message to someone on their wall is a way of validating them amongst their peers. Likewise, teens make choices to go private to avoid humiliating one of their friends.

Yet, their idea of public is not about all people across all space and all time. They want publics of peers, not publics where creeps and parents lurk.

Bly Lauritano-Werner (17, Maine):

My mom always uses the excuse about the internet being 'public' when she defends herself. It's not like I do anything to be ashamed of, but a girl needs her privacy. I do online journals so I can communicate with my friends. Not so my mother could catch up on the latest gossip of my life.

Properties of technology have complicated what it means to be in public. We are all used to being in publics that don't include all people across all space and all time. Many of us grew up gossiping with friends out in public and stopping the moment that an adult walks over. This isn't possible when things are persistent. And it's really hard to be public to all peers and just keep certain people out. So teens are learning how to negotiate a world where the very meaning of public and private have changed. Again, this is a good thing. They're going to need these skills in the future.

The day before, at Web2Open, I had heard something similar in the Troll Whispering session. Christy Canida explained that when someone posts something trollish or otherwise dubious on her site, they get put in a state where only they can see their posts, but no-one else can (except Christy and the other conversation monitors). This damps down the flame responses until Christy and co have time to review, and maybe release them, but in their view the post is on the site, but no-one is responding.

This varying view of the web, depending on who you are, seems odd at first, but it is in fact a recognition in code of what actually exists in human attention. We don't all read the same web, we see our own reflections in what we seek through searches or filtered by our homophily-led reading.

Which is where Twitter comes in. Like Jeff, I've been twittering more than blogging recently, and while immediacy is part of it, a far stronger thing is that I have a sense of public there - a public of people I choose to follow and who chose to follow me. Everyone who uses Twitter sees a different, semi-overlapping public, which maps closer to our individual idea of the digital public we are speaking to, and listening to; one that maps more closely what the socialogist and theorists have been describing for a while.