Celebrity: What is it?
It is clear that without them our magazines would be empty, our newspapers would be uninteresting and the lives of some may be incomplete.
Are we really that obsessed with celebrity culture that we find the need to follow their every action on social networking sites such as Twitter and find out who dumped who on E! And need to know which celeb has put on a few pounds in Heat?
This whole obsession with celebrities has become a ‘cult’, and so celebrities are being portrayed as idols and religious references are used to describe them. But are they not just like you and I? Just doing their job to make a living? Even if that job is in the limelight? Are we that uninteresting that we need a celebrity to make ourselves feel better?
However you cannot completely blame the obsessed for their fixation. It is all down to the media and how they portray these celebs in magazines and on the news.
Photographers and the paparazzi get paid high prices for the photos they take; the better-known the celebrity the higher the price of the picture. But there is a twist, the photos can’t be of an ordinary day for the celebrity, they tend to do better if they are of ‘wild nights’ like of our favourite 'party gal' Lindsay Lohan or unflattering revealing photos of Britney or a celebrity who has had a dramatic changed in weight, Kerry Katona ring any bells? It is beyond me the reason for why this is so but it is how it is and may never change. Photos are then slapped into pages and pages of magazines and sold to those interested. If a celeb is referred to in a particular way in one magazine day in day out, eventually they will be seen as what they are described as in the magazines and the readers eventually have a fixation on this celebrity, which turns to a deep obsession which only the individual can rid of.
So when people are asked; ‘why are we so fascinated by celebrity lifestyle?’ we get responses such as, “...because they’re rich, famous, and good looking, which most of us want to be.”
Other reasons for obsession include “...we find it interesting how they have problems just like we do...
And if they make mistakes, we can learn from them”
So it might be that celebrity culture isn’t all bad as people are benefiting from lessons taught by the lives of celebrities. Yet we have problems such as anorexia and eating disorders, to blame on celebrity lifestyle. The pressure on supermodels to be a well below average size, zero, has got young teens wanting to do the same having massive effect on their health. But obviously this isn’t what the celeb magazines and models intend to promote, however it still is what is getting out and young people are seeing what they want rather than what is shown.
Maybe there isn’t a real reason for people being obsessed over celebrity lifestyle. I, myself have a problem of wanting to know every detail of my favourite celebrities life, but don’t really know the reason for why I want to do this. I guess the mystery still remains to why we obsess and infatuate and it is just a guilty pleasure for most and time pass for others.
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