Why Are People Interested In Celebrities’ Lives? Essay Sample

If you ask an average American how many children do Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt have, when did Monica Bellucci divorce Luc Besson, why did Rihanna break up with Kris Brown, or what sexual orientation of Neil Patrick Harris (played Barney in “How I Met Your Mother”) is, he will answer all those question after a couple of seconds. With intensive development and popularization of digital technologies, media and social media platforms, with wide propagation of freethinking and freedom of action, the details of personal life of celebrities became more available and open for public attention. Having always been interested in private life of famous people, society today became almost obsessed with the observation of stars’ personal lives. The effect of people’s close attention to celebrities’ way of life has a complex of reasons, however, all of them are characterized by one profound cause: being primarily a unit of community, human seeks to be involved in every social activity by various ways in order to consider himself as an integral and important part of society he lives in.
While evaluating the cause of people’s concern about celebrities’ personal lives, the role of media and social media here should be taken into account. Since networks have turned into the massive and unlimited source of news and data, modern Internet user prefers to receive all information about external world from electronic media, including social media platforms. Ultimately, having spent a lot of time by reading news feed on social networks, people, and especially adolescents, became addicted to this type of ‘communication’ with external world: media talk, people listen. Moreover, users started to perceive virtual world as alternative reality where the illusion of living full lives emerged: people transferred their real social activity to virtual one. Thereby, being deeply involved in virtual world, people (as consumers of mass culture) receive and consume an endless amount of news about private life of famous people from media and social networks.
Meanwhile, popularization of media and social networks as the cause of society’s great interest towards celebrities’ personal lives is a new phenomenon. And there are other, more ‘classic’, reasons of why people are so concerned about the details of someone else’s life. One of these reasons is human’s desire to monitor the eventful life of successful people since the human himself does not have such life. And it is normal for every individual to want to be rich, successful, famous, and beloved because all these qualities could characterize him as significant unit of society. Unfortunately, most people are not able to achieve great goals during their lives, so they prefer to follow interesting life of public persons in order to live through someone else’s exciting events. Therefore, people fill their boring lives with the breathtaking stories from the lives of stars, so that they can create an illusion of their engagement in social activity.
At the same time, there is another cause of the effect of people’s insatiable interest towards the personal lives of celebrities, and it lies in humans’ desire to communicate. Being a social creation, every person seeks to connect with other social creations; in this sense, oral and verbal communication appears as the best way of such connection. And for people, the most interesting and favorite topic of conversation is other people; personal life of celebrities in turn becomes an inexhaustible source of news, gossip, and public scandals. People discuss such themes with those who are also interested in the details of private life of famous people, thus, through such conversation someone can find common interests and views with others and in turn these people can become much closer. So, society is interested in knowing about the personal lives of celebrities because people can discuss these lives with others, and thus they fulfill their natural desire to communicate.
The final cause of the effect is partly connected with the previous one. Communication plays an essential role in every human’s life, and in order to be an interesting communicator person tries to be aware of the latest news, stories, events, and tendencies that happen all over the world. People always want to discuss actual and urgent issues, they love to talk about something new and exciting. Again, the private life of famous people is the perfect source of such types of conversations. Therefore, the final cause of people’s interest towards someone else’s life is their desire to stay in trend, to discuss new themes and stories, which in turn gives people the sense of their belonging to the global society and to the world full of events.