From: Keith Henson (hkhenson@rogers.com)
Date: Tue 16 Dec 2003 - 14:28:24 GMT
At 01:00 PM 16/12/03 +0000, you wrote:
> > > I enjoyed this:
> > > http://www.sscnet.ucla.edu/ioa/arnold/arnoldwebpages/ideavirus.html
> >
> <V good, though the Arnold-as-meme-projector phenomenon has been
>anticipated
> > by the theory (and Gladwell's Tipping point makes it clear the Madison Ave
> > crowd is already there)....I also saw resaerch recently that shows the
> > appeal of OK, Hello et al is that we yearn for role models, and we don't
> > have small communities anymore so we access teh global villages' brightest
> > stars - more power to Blackwell's thesis .>
> >
> Indeed, there's a whole set of theories around celebrity worship,
>and the popularity of tabloid sex and scandal stories. One author suggested
>that the reason people seem so interested in celebrities private lives is
>that their breaches of behaviour (drugs, affairs, and what have you) act as
>'middle order moral events'- in other words actions that don't have literal
>profound social consequences but give people a common event through which to
>articulate, discuss and evaluate their own, and wider society's moral
>values. Check out Tomlinson's chapter in Lull & Hinerman's interesting 1997
>book 'Media Scandals'.
Good points.
A more fundamental question is why we have celebrities at all? Humans
evolved in hunter-gatherer groups that topped out most of the time at
100-150 people. Our abilities to recognize people might stretch 5 times
that high, but evolution doesn't tend to build in a lot of excess capacity
(brains are *really* expensive to run, and a substantial fraction of them
is devoted to face recognition). "Generally known" people probably map
into the leaders of a tribe--which puts a cap on the number of people a
mass media communicating population can consider celebrities.
Prediction: the "shape of the curve" for celebs (numbers vs a measure of
their popularity) in a mass media communicating population will be a
constant over time since it depends on the average human mental ability to
recognize and "know about" a limited number of people and not variables
such as the size of the population.
List members with more time than I have might be able to extend these
speculations.
Keith Henson
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