We see famous people almost every day: on social media, in the news and on the big screen, we listen to their music and know about their lives perhaps more than we ought to. We only know their public personas, of course, not the real people behind them, but we still form opinions based on them.
In this age of social media, it's particularly easy to think that you know a famous person if you follow their daily life. Celebrities have never been closer to us; that is, we've never felt closer to them than before. Like Liam Gallagher coming onto Twitter now and again to answer some silly questions and generally shoot the breeze with his fans.
Some celebrities become more relatable to us on social media and that's a phenomenon that wasn't really prominent some years ago. Samantha Brooks, a postdoctoral researcher at King's College London, told Yahoo! that before, we would only see a rare interview with our favorite celebrity here and there.
"Now many public figures post openly about their personal lives, their thoughts, feelings, opinions, their day-to-day lives, etc. on Instagram, Twitter, TikTok. They're a lot more 'accessible,'" Brooks explained. Professor of Cultural Sociology at London's City University Chris Rojek told the BBC that, back in the day, celebrities like Marlon Brando were almost gods.
"People may now think Beyoncé is a god but she is much nearer to us than 30 or 40 years ago... We're drowning in media access to celebrities," Professor Rojek explained. Many experts agree, saying that we're starting to feel fatigued when it comes to celebrities: too much, too many, and too everywhere.
But why do we put famous people on such a pedestal? Why do we idolize them in the first place? One reason is quite innocuous: it just takes our minds off of daily stress and problems. It's a form of escapism; idolizing someone who has a glamorous life takes us away from our own routine, which we might view as dull and uninteresting.
However, other reasons can be problematic. Samantha Brooks suggests we might idolize famous people because we aspire to be like them or are looking for a gap in our lives to fill. "[They have] attributes we feel are lacking in our own life, or it might be that forming an attachment to a celebrity — even a parasocial, unreciprocated one — can be a kind of compensation for lacking real-life relationships, real intimacy, real attachments, to people in our own lives."
However, there's been a shift in how we perceive celebrities lately. People are becoming more and more skeptical about how relatable celebrities can actually be, calling them out on social media for their privileges and refusing to participate in celebrity worship culture. The turning point for this was possibly the 2020 COVID-19 lockdown.
