What's a Celebrity, Anyway?

Here in the U.S., we seem to have an ever-growing fascination with celebrity. Indeed we all have a friend who can quote the most inane bits of celebrity trivia on command. There is also no shortage of web sites that make a very pretty penny by purveying every little detail related to every little dilettante. The more trivial the celebrity trivia the better, it seems. And these people do nothing other than act in movie and on television, in made up plots, playing made up people.




For example, did you know there are entire web sites dedicated to the hair styles of Jennifer Aniston? And we all know there are web sites that track the very whereabouts of one Brittany Spears. You can have celebrity trivia and tidbits delivered to your mobile phone too, just in case you need to know what Hollywood power couple is calling it quits while you're out stalking your local celebrities.




The real question here is, what does this say about our society in general, and is this fascination healthy, or harmful? Type a celebrity name into a search engine and take a look at how many sites come back as results.




On the other side of the coin, how many people can spout actual useful information about non-celebrities? Who knows anything about Winston Churchill, or Mahatma Gandhi, or any 19th century U.S. President? One might argue that these people are celebrities too, and if they were still alive, certainly they would be. Perhaps we are making a distinction here between people famous for being entertainers, and others being celebrities as a result of some act in the public service. Others are celebrities through no fault of their own.




Certainly some criminals would fall into this category. Other criminals, you could argue, did what they did out of a desire to be celebrities. So we've determined then that there are different kinds of celebrities. There are entertainers; there are other public figures, which are widely known because of what they do, as opposed to those who do what they do in order to become widely known. And there are others who are celebrities because of some unfortunate series of events over which they had no control.




Any way you slice it, sometimes our fascination with celebrity trivia occupies too much space on the shelf of things a society should care about. And then again, sometimes we could all use a little bit of a diversion from our mundane and boring lives.

GuessForFree is a trivia web site with several categories and games, including (celebrrity trivia) . Art Gib is a freelance writer.

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