Culture of Celebrity (Score 2)

I think the short answer is that people are
fascinated with celebrities because these
celebrities appear in the media.

Suppose I own a magazine. Being a good
capitalist, I want to maximize the number of
issues that I sell. I don't think it's a big
leap to see that it's in my self-interest to
do everything I can to identify certain people
as inherently newsworthy and persuade my
readers that they should consume any material
related to these newsworthies. Whether this
newsworthiness is somehow defensible (in the
case of politicians, artists, technologists)
or not (pop musicians, glitterati) is immaterial.

So, if I can persuade you that JFKJ is a person
you should be interested in because he's
good-looking, rich and the son of a former
president, I can make more money. If throwing
in meaningless adjectives like "hero to a
generation" pumps the bottom line, so much the
better.

People end up caring about these media projections
because their peers do, because there are
billion-dollar companies trying to get them to
care and because it distracts them from their
lives (who of us has a life that can match the
non-stop excitement of that of a media-mediated
celebrity?).

I believe that this issue is at heart a
sociological, not a technical, issue. The
newspapers in my city (Globe & Mail, Toronto Star,
Toronto Sun and National Post) all devoted
above-the-fold pictures and headlines to the
JFKJ incident for several days.

SS
You can never be too rich, thin or cynical.