britney
I saw the following headline: Britney likes eating for twoand wondered about celebrity. Why is it that some people are famous? I think it's that who is famous is a direct consequence of "the marketplace", a concept so nebulous that Minsky would yell at me for rewording "emergent". So we obviously have needs for these people. Their paths to and from stardom reflect the hopes and desires of the group. But the special people couldn't exist without the journalists themselves creating stories that the everyday people like, or without the massive multi-national media corporations having to compensate their cost of chopping down trees, slathering the paper with bight colors, and paying the guys who take pictures of the special people on vacation.
I believe every society has to have its celebrities, the cult of personality not only being a hit pop song in much the same way denial isn't just a river in Egypt. People have always had their leaders and heroes, and their village idiots and drunks and so on. These people were famous where they were, and the massive distribution of the same information has given us a global level of celebrity. I know the same person is famous that some guy in rural china knows is famous. That's pretty wild. Our need to have things to relate to other people about, specifically other people to talk to other people about, gives us a glimpse into what makes us the way we are with respect to other people. We use these stories and examples of famous people to know what gets you good and bad publicity, and I think it keeps everybody more or less acting in a manner that steers them right down the middle of the road. People, in other words, use celebrities to socially flock.
Another thing about celebrites, sort of:
If you are in the year 1000, in a town of a certain size, your town has developed certain roles for people. There's going to be a lot of wives, maybe the largest single group of people, a bunch of children, then there's a couple police-types, some soldiers, a bar owner, some chicken farmers, a blacksmith, and a tax collector. These types of roles emerged to fit the needs of the group.
These days, because our society is mind-bogglingly enormous, we have specialized to an extent that is absurd. For every thousand people, there are a bunch of wives and tax collectors, like always, but there is also a dentist now. Maybe one in every ten thousand people is an anesthesiologist, every one in a hundred thousand is a rock star, one every six thousand people is an inventor, and one in every four hundred is a computer programmer. I say maybe because those numbers are definitely wrong but I don't know where to get good ones. Because we can imagine statistics shedding some light on this accidental societal arrangement, it's possible to imagine the rock star as having "emerged" to fit into a position that may not have existed per se, but was in some way vacant. This is a weakness of my brain, and maybe of yours, when trying to comprehend emergence. A thought I've found myself gravitating to as it pertains to this is, if the society grows twice as big as it is now, what other specialties would emerge? But I think now that I've spent the time at the keyboard thinking about it, that it would all be basically the same. We would still have our wives, our children, our advertising executives, our evil CEOs, our crazy politicians, and of course our rock stars and celebrities, and we'd also have people that fit into technologies that didn't exist before; there was a time when lunch-meat processors couldn't exist.
Celebrity, I think, is a phenomenon that scales well to populations; no matter where or when you go in human history, you're going to have them. They may appear to be famous for fame's sake, but they're fulfilling a very special purpose. They're not only selling newspapers, they're also letting people know what and what not to do.
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