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As your perception sounds quite negative I'll try to change your view!
Instead of looking down on people fanatifally following a "celebrity", take pity on them:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parasocial_interaction
In short: their brain chemistry tricks them into thinking that they are following a friend and have the emotional reactions and interests as we'd hope our real friends do.
I find it really sad to be honest.
I don't really understand it, but I think you can apply your argument to anything. Why watch Game of Thrones, how does that affect your life? Why browse Lemmy, how does that affect your life? Why play video games, how does that affect your life? Why watch sports, how does it affect your life?
The answer is probably something like "because I enjoy it", and the answer for the gossipers is probably the same. So who am I to judge.
My hobbies could beat up your hobbies
My hobbies could asphyxiate or poison your hobbies.
(I just started my distillation process today to recover and purifify isopropyl alcohol from my 3D resin prints, if you were curious.)
Actually, your hobby could cure my hobby (resin printing).
This thread took an unexpectedly neat turn. I wonder if there's a good hobbies community on Lemmy somewhere where folks post about the interesting stuff they get up to.
Or a hobby exchange where people help other people with their hobby in a mutually beneficial manner.
Shit, I just re-invented a barter economy didn't I.
I'm still in the PLA printing world. It's plenty sufficient for my electronics projects.
The makerspace here on campus has a resin printer and the results are really cool.
I am in it mostly for functional prints, but I couldn't help myself and had to do some fun stuff when I started learning about resin and such. The details are amazing.
That was some of the neatest benefits to resin: organic shapes. When doing figures, creatures, and plants, resin is better than PLA for the final look and feel. The fineness of the print is also great. That's a phenomenal Xenomorph and the details really show through.
I like PLA (and Petg & abs) for maintenance and utilities printing. Like, i print kitchen helpers like drawer dividers, hangers etc.
I printed a ton of helper stuff, as well as some house parts. We have a 1920 house, so there lots of odd books and crannies. In the past, I'd buy standard house parts (electrical covers, fixtures, etc) and then cut/mod them to fit. Now, I CAD up a custom part, print it, seal it with a clear coat, and bam! It fits perfectly.
Nice one
From an evolutionary standpoint it's important to know what's going on with people close to you. Who are people close to you? Why, obviously people who you're familiar with - those whose faces you recognise and whose names you know.
So yeah, it's a bug in how we're coded.
I think people have a tendency to use evolutionary psychology as a crutch in explaining human behaviour. Like they suggest it can explain everything when it's only one factor of many.
However in this specific case your theory makes a lot of sense to me.
You're talking about at least millions of people making billions of decisions. It's always going to have multiple factors. But evolution is almost always directly relevant, because it shaped our brain to the patterns it follows.
In this example, there are also plenty of external factors. The internet makes it possible to follow the behavior of celebrities. The celebrities have significant marketing teams actively trying to grab your interest (plus whatever businesses they're famous in relation to trying to piggy back). The fact that you don't have to spend 18 hours a day tracking prey just in case you manage to kill it. The fact that we're hugely biased to be interested in more attractive people, to find people we're exposed to more (especially in more glamorous lights) more attractive and most celebrities are also extremely attractive with professional teams to handle their appearance. The list always goes on.
But evolution is pretty much always a key lens to why we are what we are, because it actually is the why to almost all the low level behaviors that add up to big picture specific modern ones.
People like drama and celebs are like casual acquaintances that everyone knows.
Honestly, that's pretty close to my reason. It's more like "I love hot tea, and celebrities are a guilt-free source of it," though.
It's kind of a mutually beneficial relationship, in a way. Many celebrities (not all, the ones that don't aren't ones I enjoy hearing about because it feels to much like invading someone's privacy) thrive on having their names constantly in the tables, and I get enjoyment from the schadenfreude. Kinda like pro wrestling, maybe?
This is probably the best way I've heard it explained, ever
Can I say something controversial?
Celebrity gossip has exactly the same appeal as Shipping and fan-theories, just for people who are more interested in reality than some TV-show.
So just let people enjoy things.
I have never thought of it like that before, but it makes SO much sense.
They can enjoy whatever they want, I still think they're goofy.
For sure... but those 2 groups are both equally goofy.
Imagine if they were left alone in a room <3
To add and reiterate what others have said:
I've been wondering the same about Elon Musk. Here seemingly nobody likes him yet there's a daily feed of articles about him with haters talking shit in the comments. Since I don't follow celebrity news and I have him blocked on twitter that dude would effectively not exist to me if it wasn't for Lemmy constantly providing me updates on what he's up to.
Why pay attention to something that just makes you angry..
He bought the biggest platform and forces his weirdo content onto it and that has an effect on the other platforms that use that content because they’re no creative. It’s not that he’s actually popular. We all despise that shit bag fuck.
That's easy, because he has a huge range of influence. If a person like that stands opposite of the views that you're passionate about, you'd just wish for him to shut up lest he pulls more people to the wrong side.
It probably doesn't work like that, but it might feel like it.
Putin has a lot more influence on the daily life of me and most other people here yet I almost never see him discussed.
I don't think that talking shit about Elon on Lemmy has any difference on what he does or says. Here's virtually no one to even convert. People are preaching to the choir.
I can somehow understand "following" celebrities lives. People like drama, it's not that much different than watching a shitty tv show or reality show. What I will never ever ever understand is people literally worshipping, giving money, defending and praising celebrities. It's straight up stupid behavior.
I agree it's stupid, but it's basically just people living through the success of others. Same thing happens with sports teams, people have "their team" and the team's success/failure can dramatically affect how they feel.
I'm not into celebrity gossip, but from what I can tell based on people I've seen who are into it, I think it's less about the celebrities themselves and more about enjoying gossip in general. If you and your friends are really into gossip, but you don't have anything new to say about people you know in real life, you can gossip about celebrities instead. It's just a thing you can enjoy talking about despite not having any actual connection to it.
I think most humans have a certain desire to gossip, probably a side effect of us being social animals. I can imagine that gossiping can be somewhat beneficial if you live in a tribe or small town.
With our way of life shifting to large cities in which you hardly know your neighbour, and digitalization making sure we regularly see these celebrities, I can see how that might trick our brains into caring about their everyday lives.
Yeah, you can imagine how within a small community, if person x was particularly bad at paying their debts for instance, that would eventually get around and people would stop loaning to them. This makes fewer people lose their own resources by not loaning them, but also just knowing that gossip happens creates a social pressure to conform to pro-social behaviors.
Because they’re stupid
I have a take I've never heard before. For Americans anyway, celebrities are the royalty we never had and serve the same purpose, whatever that is.
As to the gossip, I think there's often a case of "look how the mighty have fallen" schadenfreude.
Because it's so much fun Jan, get it!
At least I guess that's the reason.
Nothing new under the sun...
This might come as a shock, but back in the day there were these things called "Newspapers" where people got almost all their news and information.
One of the more popular columns in a newspaper was the "Gossip Column", where a celebrity fortune could literally be made or lost depending on what that particular columnist wrote about them.
Hedda Hopper was NOTORIOUS for her column which ran from 1938 to 1966.
I feel like it's because we're told to. Celebrities are a big industry. Lots of money goes into making them and we think we're independent thinkers but we're not. We follow them because they know how to make us follow them. It could be a brown paper bag. If enough people tricked into being interested we all follow them.
An alternative idea is it's the same reason people like biographies or drama related stories.
Because they have no lives of their own.
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people.
It's because they have nothing of value in their own lives to talk or gossip about.
