WHY do people follow celebrity gossip??

[Jeivar]

As much as I loathe paparazzi as human vermin, I have to acknowledge that they wouldn't exist if there wasn't a market for their "work". But why, though? WHY, on God's green Earth, do people click links or buy papers because they want to see Brad Pitt at the beach? Or Julia Roberts buying groceries? Or Eminem looking annoyed? I enjoy those people when they're doing their jobs, because they work in entertainment.

Everyday life isn't entertainment. Why why WHY do people invest themselves in a particular celebrity and follow their every move like a real-life TV show? I honestly don't get it. I completely avoid this whole gossip garbage, and when I'm accidentally exposed to it I just feel embarrassed and weird.

[Knaight]

There's a lot of reasons. To some extent it fills a similar role to fiction for a lot of people, it's an area of common cultural knowledge and thus a method that facilitates socialization that would happen anyways, and perhaps most critically some fraction of it functions as synecdoches for social, cultural, or political issues that are often more approachable to people than pages of statistics and can briefly get heavy focus on certain topics, to some extent functioning in a similar way to news (much of which provides a fundamentally worse understanding of the world than detailed study of existing information, but which can be a good way to slip in the results of some of that study if handled well and given actual context).

Something like being at the beach or buying groceries doesn't really provide much of that, but that's also not what tends to get headlines. That tends to follow more salacious stuff, and while some celebrity couple getting a divorce and fighting over their kids isn't directly relevant or even directly interesting to many it does provide a nice entrance point to divorces and managing responsibilities with kids around them. That's a little more relevant to a lot of people, between divorcees with kids, couples who considered divorce, people with parents who divorced, and people with parents in marriages where divorce was either a real possibility or seemed like it probably should have been. Add in one more degree of separation through the magic phrase "I have a friend who" and that's basically everyone.

There's also obsessive fans, of course, and obsessive anti-fans, but that generally seems a lot more marginal than celebrity gossip as an in to real conversations.

[Pex]

I used to because of fandom and 4th wall breaking. I enjoy the illusion of the fictional world of the characters. It becomes interesting seeing the characters as their real world actor selves and how they are not the character at all. Even seeing actors in different roles becomes intriguing, from Captain America naked as a banana split to Molly Weasly singing and dancing on a table to an Abba song.

I don't any more because Hollywood hates me, and I mean that literally, for reasons we can't discuss here so I hate them back. However, I can still smile at the occasional gossip where the hatred has not yet spread, such as appreciating Grant Gustin getting married recently.

[Lvl 2 Expert]

The Accidental Space Spy has a theory on that.

[Ramza00]

As much as I loathe paparazzi as human vermin, I have to acknowledge that they wouldn't exist if there wasn't a market for their "work". But why, though? WHY, on God's green Earth, do people click links or buy papers because they want to see Brad Pitt at the beach? Or Julia Roberts buying groceries? Or Eminem looking annoyed? I enjoy those people when they're doing their jobs, because they work in entertainment.

No meaning, only lore!

I think that quote is the crux of the matter. People separate things into different dichotomy baskets such as meaning and lore, but in reality humans enjoy both of them.

Some people enjoy obscure comic book lore and power rankings, and some people do the same thing in sports, and other people in celebrity gossip.

To you an outsider it seems obscure and trite but I bet if we examine you we will find something that is just as absurd if we look at it hard enough. After all humans are people who derive enjoyment from investment and cultivation and this includes acts of investment and cultivation with feelings, with doing, and also intellectually investing. In psychology this is the ABCs with Affect, Behavior, Cognition, even though the more accurate description is Affect, Conative, Cognition.



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Humans need to do all these things, and we sprinkle in these activities even if they do not serve a large purpose for they are not that strenuous aka we in our mind loops feel like we are investing but at the same time the investment feels free for it does not take any time, money, energy that seems to be giving up anything major at the moment.

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Of course this is not quite true for humans can be "hacked" and waste an excessive amount of time and wealth on these little joys of life. For example video game addiction to those free to play games (Freemium) that sometimes people spend thousands of dollars in. It is about knowing how to balance those competing desires and drives and be something that provides a dopamine rush yet at the same time not feel like it has a large amount of cost in the moment, and it is just easy to slide into your life.

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Other people enjoy these celebrity stuff for the stories they create in the big screen and other media properties. They are not here for the lore, they are here for the story meaning of those movies and other media properties. No lore, only meaning! No meaning, only experience!

[The Jack]

Moreso the above reasons, but i think there's also a little bit of

These people are more successful than me
I want to know how/why/that I'm similar/how they're better/why I'm better.

[Ramza00]

Moreso the above reasons, but i think there's also a little bit of

These people are more successful than me
I want to know how/why/that I'm similar/how they're better/why I'm better.

YES!

But understand there are multiple drives going on that are dual-seeking, one drive may want to learn the secret wisdoms and to mimic this secret wisdoms with mimicry, while another drive simultaneously wants to reaffirm the self / ego and feel superior to people who have more social status, more beauty, more money, more something. These multiple drives together (which have very different reasons of being) may both complimentary agree on an approach / withdrawal choice. The motivations are different, but the motivations can agree on the same action. And during the same action there can be changes in the levels of arousal, the levels of saliency while your brain processes what it is reading, seeing, hearing, etc in the moment. These changes in the level of arousal then has feedback mechanisms on what motivations are being activated, and the choice you make with approach / withdrawal and so on. A cascade of choices with a feed-forward and feed-back mechanism simultaneously.

But YES at what The Jack said.

[truemane]

I've always seen it as the expression of a sort of sublimated herd instinct. We're pack animals at heart and I think there's something deep, deep, deep inside of us that drives us to submit to authority.

And the meanings of "submit" and "authority" are very different for different people. But I think we're urged to put some people on pedestals and declare them to be 'doing it right.'

And, in North American culture, where we have no monarchy, and organized religion does not occupy as central and influential a role as once it did, "celebrity" is another expression of that urge.

I think a lot of the frenzied devotion to various forms of pseudo-science, comes down to the same thing, because of the inevitable links with world-wide conspiracies.

And I think most of us do it, in some way or another. We are often surprised when very smart people are very stupid about things outside their area of expertise (like when world renowned scientists are horrible racists or misogynists) and we ask people we respect for their opinions in topics on which they aren't really any more or less qualified than we are.

And it so happens that this urge exists in a time and place with an ever-present mass media that exists to pander to our basest and more easily exploitable instincts. The supply exists because of the demand but the demand exists because of the supply, and around and around and around.

[Jeivar]

To you an outsider it seems obscure and trite but I bet if we examine you we will find something that is just as absurd if we look at it hard enough.

Oh, no doubt. But MY interests don't harassing someone in real life, spying on their dates, confronting their children with camera flashes or just generally abandoning basic human decency.

It's disgusting.

[Ramza00]

Oh, no doubt. But MY interests don't harassing someone in real life, spying on their dates, confronting their children with camera flashes or just generally abandoning basic human decency.

It's disgusting.

I agree and I can give a long rant on the reasons why this stuff does affect people, and how it is bad for individuals and society but my rants will not fix the underlying problems. Giving the rant makes me insufferable for it is an is-ought problem aka Hume's Guillotone / fact–value gap ("what is" = fact and "what ought to be" = value and there is both simultaneously a thin line between fact and values and sometimes there is an impossible distance between them.)

But why should I give the rant when the insufferable Will McAvoy of the Newsroom has already given the rant.



The main part starts at 4:00 but it gets so good 5:55 to 6:15. You may want to watch the first 4 minutes (or you can skip it) for it is subtle setup to Will's previous emotional state prior to the joy that is 4 mins in.

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Jeivar do understand I agree with you and I think the solution is not to try to shame the people who like to read these things, but instead make it harder for this market to exist with things like anti-stalking laws and so on.

Gossip will exist but there is a difference between abstract gossip where you never interact the person vs you being in someone's space and so on.

That said I find this whole thing horrific for there is really no good solutions to this problem.

(Note the Newsroom which is a horrible show in general but sometimes fun...well the Newsroom also has some good additional clips on similar subject matter such as this one. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Em_KXNNYKjo Note this fictional clip is based on this real exchange where Jimmy Kimmel subsituting for Larry King interviewed a Gawker journalist about the Gawker stalking app of 2007. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2-avakrRUaU)

[Legato Endless]

I think there's a much more succinct and less esoteric reason for why Celebrity gossip is popular.

Because people gossip about those they know. This isn't particularly arcane. And part of the appeal of celebrities and celebrity culture is the relational desires they satiate.

Gossip is merely one of the ways people engage in the parasocial relationships that have flourished in the age of mass media and pop culture.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x3vD_CAYt4g

https://www.findapsychologist.org/pa...-fascinations/

https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.atl...cial-lives.amp

[BeerMug Paladin]

Gossip as a thing people engage in seems to me rather likely to be a mechanism of establishing and enforcing social classes (choosing a leader is important for a group, even if it's harmful to many individuals). It's just that the human evolutionary trait of gossip isn't something that serves much function anymore from a group-cohesion standpoint. So people end up spreading in and reveling in gossip that doesn't serve any such purpose, such as random gossip about celebrities they'll never meet or know.

As for why (supposedly thinking) people engage in it willingly, I see a lot of good answers here, from engaging in trivia-seeking and interest to the above comment which is probably the best answer.

[Knaight]

Oh, no doubt. But MY interests don't harassing someone in real life, spying on their dates, confronting their children with camera flashes or just generally abandoning basic human decency.

It's disgusting.

I had a response post to this which got eaten, but the short version - there's versions of following celebrity gossip based more on interviews and willful publicity than stalking, and while your personal version of your interests don't involve harassing someone in real life your presence on this forum suggests pretty strongly you're into video games, which absolutely has a contingent about just that, though they're less into camera flashes and more into bomb threats. Paparazzi are terrible people by the nature of their work, but it's worth keeping some perspective there on what other hobbies look like by comparison. Excessive amounts of jerks is unfortunately a near constant.

[Scarlet Knight]

...I don't any more because Hollywood hates me, and I mean that literally, for reasons we can't discuss here so I hate them back...

I am intrigued. I mean I don't want to know why, but how does one get and entire industry/city to hate you? Even Roman Polanski & Charlie Sheen still get work.

Wait, are you Harvey Weinstein? Nevermind, I know you can't say.

[Xyril]

I am intrigued. I mean I don't want to know why, but how does one get and entire industry/city to hate you? Even Roman Polanski & Charlie Sheen still get work.

Despite horrible moral failings in his personal life, professionally Polanski was pretty talented. Uncommonly so, apparently.

While I wouldn't call Sheen a talented actor, I do think he's quite good at playing some variation of himself in a very entertaining way. Ultimately, money talks.

Acting like Polanski or Harvey Weinstein, without having enough talent to have some sort of leverage/value, seems like a good way to piss off Hollywood permanently.

[Olinser]

Why do people follow celebrity gossip?

The same reason people slow down to gape at car accidents and eagerly consume news about huge train and plane wrecks.

Because celebrities have a tendency to destroy their lives in spectacular public fashion and people enjoy watching other people destroy themselves.