The culture of instant stardom is something that takes a toll on everyone, whether you have close ties to the entertainment industry, or if you’re living far off the map, planning an internet-based revolution. It’s difficult to escape that instant need to look at three or more things without putting them into some kind of order in your mind. This could very well be the result of the shows where people compete and try to have talent in front of other people. There are judges, and there is a pithy host, and there is usually an audience, and all of these units have the ability to make a judgment.
Sometimes it’s a swiftrank, and sometimes it’s less quick, but we have a new reflex in us that we’ve never seen before. It’s a fascinating phenomenon, but it may be one we will have to reckon with in the years to come. Who knows what kinds of realities are shaped when we can have access to all kinds of new information in seconds? This becomes even more complex when we add the culture of stardom to the equation. Of course, the idea of celebrity is really nothing new. Milan Kundera’s Immortality has some fantastic and elegant passages about the history of the sound bite, arguing that it was in existence long before the phenomenon of recording media accessible today.
We have always had an uncanny ability for discernment, and it’s one of the great pillars of wisdom. What’s possibly novel, in these times, is not our ability to discern, but the need to judge. It is built into how we look at the world, and it’s certainly something that’s peculiar to the age where rising stars are often determined by instant ratings on television and the internet. What’s peculiar here is not the act of judgement itself, but the impulse behind it. We are programmed as if our ability to make quantitative judgments was in fact a life of death proposition. And the fact of the matter is, there is no giant elk running toward us, threatening our lives if we don’t decide who is the better pop singer. Interestingly, we are at the point where we all have ready answers, and are willing to speak into the elk’s antlers at the drop of a hat.
Related posts: