Folks Online Reveal Why They No Longer Respect These 40 A-List Celebrities

To find out more about our society’s fascination with celebrity culture, Bored Panda spoke with Claire Sisco King, the Associate Professor and Director of Undergraduate Studies in the Department of Communication Studies at Vanderbilt University. King explained that celebrity is defined by a number of paradoxes. “Celebrities often become sources of identification for their fans; audiences often imagine them as relatable or ‘just like us.’ At the same time, celebrities are aspirational figures who seem to lead extraordinary lives that are out of reach for most people.”

The professor explained that this tension between celebrities’ imagined ordinariness and extraordinariness seems to drive much of this fascination. “Because of their intense visibility, celebrities become almost like mirrors for their audiences who look for their own images in them; sometimes audiences see idealized versions of themselves in celebrities or versions to which they aspire.”

King continued: “Other times, comparisons to celebrities can leave fans feeling inferior. That sense of imagining or defining ourselves in relation to public figures, whether we find it pleasurable or painful, is a big part of much celebrity fandom.”

Moreover, there are also cases in which audiences take pleasure in disidentifying with celebrities, the professor argues. “For instance, when they are involved in a scandal or make public missteps. Or, when celebrities experience tragedies, fans might find themselves identifying with the celebrities’ pain but might also feel relief that they themselves did not experience the tragedy.” Therefore, King argues that our fascination with celebrities is often characterized by mixed emotions and by vacillation between feeling close or similar to celebrities and feeling distant from or unlike them.

What’s also interesting about celebrity culture is that famous people also have a great deal of presence in people’s everyday lives—in film and television, on magazine covers and advertisements, and across social media. “And yet,” King states, “most people never actually come into contact with celebrities and experience them at a distance or only virtually.”In this way, they are visible to us but almost always out of reach. “This tension between presence and absence also seems to drive people’s desire for celebrities,” she explained.

“Finally, celebrities often represent larger ideals or values. For instance, in the United States, we often interpret celebrities as illustrations of the American Dream,” King suggested. “Attachment to celebrities often derives from people’s attachment to the values or ideologies with which they are associated.”

“In this regard,” King told us, “the tensions between identification and aspiration come into play. If I imagine I am like a celebrity who achieved what I define as success, then I can imagine that I might achieve similar levels of success as well; but because most of us do not achieve the level of wealth or renown as celebrities, the drive to keep following them, and even in some cases imitating them, persists for a lot of fans.”

Moreover, “the phrase 'keeping up' in the title of the Kardashians’ reality show really captures that impulse: fans follow celebrities in the hopes that they might emulate them or enjoy the kinds of privileges they seem to experience,” the professor concluded.