PITFalls of Celebrity

Heavy is the head that wears a crown is a distorted version of the original line “Uneasy lies the head that wears a crown” (from Henry IV by Shakespeare) yet it serves the purpose The crown is a metaphor for responsibility that a person who has a certain position in society accepts whether as a leader or as a celebrity. One might wonder what the word celebrity means. Celebrity is a condition of fame and broad public recognition of an individual or group, as a result of attention given to them by mass media. Everyone who is famous and known in society is considered to be a celebrity; mostly the status is given to people from the entertainment industry but, with the increase in the hype created by media, we find sportspersons, politicians and writers ‘enjoying’ the status of a celebrity only because they are well-known; whether that is in a good or bad context is another matter. And uneasy lies the head that has this ‘crown’ of celebritism on its head. Every single act that they do, every single word that they utter or quote becomes ‘news’. So, they continuously have to watch and watch out for their, let’s put it straight here, every act!

Being a celebrity means having no control over your private life. You are in the limelight all the time, you are being chased by the paparazzi 24/7 and you can become a trending social media hashtag in no time. Surveys have revealed that when people were asked about topics that get the most attention from news media, more than 40% of them said celebrity news. The number becomes three times more than any other subjects for news. The followers of celebrity news and gossip are also way larger in number than of any other subject.

The question, however, is why do people care so much about the life of those they may have never met. Francis McAndrew, an American social psychologist, puts forward a theory which roots back to tens of thousands of years. He says that the obsession of media and, in return, the public with celebrities dates back to the human being’s primeval instinct of keeping track of peers in order to compete. He further says that humans when they were cavemen lived in communal groups and initiated social structures which were based on the understanding of an individual’s resources, rivalries, ascendancy, romances and friendships. Surprisingly, power that was required then to move socially ahead in life was directly proportional to the level of how socially ‘informed’ they were about the ‘celebrated’ persons of society. “People who were driven to be busybodies did better than people who just didn’t care because they were more successful at navigating the social world,” McAndrew says. His theory justifies the public’s obsession with celebrities as one of the primordial gifts we have inherited.