The columnist Cynthia Heimel argues that because celebrity figures are known by so many people, they serve as forms of social glue, allowing people from different points of society to converse with each other, to share feelings, and essentially to carry on informal relations. “Celebrities,” she proposes, “are our common frames of reference, celebrity loathing and revilement crosses all cultural boundaries. Celebrities are not our community elders, they are our community.”
Obviously the claim about crossing all cultural boundaries is false. How true is the rest though? Off the top of my head, I’m not really sure.
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April 1, 2008 at 8:11 pm
fudgefactorfive
I’ve seen this argued before – by journalists. So it must be bollocks almost by definition.
Sorry to play the same old record but quotes like this are proof that the word “community” has become totally meaningless.
April 2, 2008 at 5:24 pm
streetlightmanifesto
I do think that to varying degrees, it provides a (very thin) common frame of reference and a loose entaglement in a common web of affections and revulsions. Even so, I agree with you the term community has been devalued. I think the actual experience of community consisted in a shared thick frame of reference yet now we’re too atomised, our lives involve too many social connections and the contexts within which we live, work and have fun are shifting more than ever. So we long after then notion of community and ‘find’ it in the smallest most trivial things…