This entry will, perhaps, smack of shallowness or total cluelessness. The inspiration came partly from Virginia Heffernan’s NY Times article “The Beautiful People, the Uglier the Better,” in which she compares modern-day celebrities to specimens or lab slides, examined in great detail by thousands of gossip site readers. In the interest of honesty, I should add, however, that my own habit of regularly checking celeb gossip websites provided an equally strong impulse to try and explain why exactly we are doing it.
Heffernan offers answers which are interesting insofar as they elevate the status of those who read celeb gossip, disseminate it and provide their own comments.
1. Readers as consumers:
We “are not primarily looking to be entertained or transported,” she writes. “We’re just looking for data, more and more data, the more raw the better.”
2. Readers as detectives and/or narative makers, ergo writers:
“there is an undeniable pleasure in inferring stories from pieces of data, whether the story is trivial — “Lonelygirl15” — or substantial, like the military service of the president. Isn’t the discovery of that pleasure, in some sense, what drives science and all manner of detective work? We’re all on the Web, weighing various kinds of data we get — eBay listings, blog posts, Craigslist solicitations — and trying to read between some pixels, and connect others."
3. Readers as tech savvies:
“maybe we’re not entirely wasting our time; we’re practicing interpreting images from the new close-range, high-def magazines and Web sites.”
I’m not sure I trust these explanations completely (blame all those years of watching The X-Files). What happened to the less sophisticated truths about those of us who enjoy gossip? Would it hurt to simply concede that we have too much time on our hands? That, rather than protecting common sense, our snarky comments only prove how rude, mean and disturbed we can be? Most importantly, doesn’t taking part in the celeb culture prove we’re a bunch of mindless, moralizing a-holes who are too lazy to actually do something useful?
Heffernan offers answers which are interesting insofar as they elevate the status of those who read celeb gossip, disseminate it and provide their own comments.
1. Readers as consumers:
We “are not primarily looking to be entertained or transported,” she writes. “We’re just looking for data, more and more data, the more raw the better.”
2. Readers as detectives and/or narative makers, ergo writers:
“there is an undeniable pleasure in inferring stories from pieces of data, whether the story is trivial — “Lonelygirl15” — or substantial, like the military service of the president. Isn’t the discovery of that pleasure, in some sense, what drives science and all manner of detective work? We’re all on the Web, weighing various kinds of data we get — eBay listings, blog posts, Craigslist solicitations — and trying to read between some pixels, and connect others."
3. Readers as tech savvies:
“maybe we’re not entirely wasting our time; we’re practicing interpreting images from the new close-range, high-def magazines and Web sites.”
I’m not sure I trust these explanations completely (blame all those years of watching The X-Files). What happened to the less sophisticated truths about those of us who enjoy gossip? Would it hurt to simply concede that we have too much time on our hands? That, rather than protecting common sense, our snarky comments only prove how rude, mean and disturbed we can be? Most importantly, doesn’t taking part in the celeb culture prove we’re a bunch of mindless, moralizing a-holes who are too lazy to actually do something useful?
