A Catheter Connecting You to Hollywood

by Danielle Smith on 05/28/2009 at 1:18 pm in Commentary, Observations, Within Range

One thing I’ve been thinking about lately is just how pervasive celebrity culture is online. You really can’t open a browser without catching some headline of some famous person’s antics. It’s even tiring for me to keep thinking about it but dang if something new and titillating doesn’t break every day. My favorites of late are Kate Gosselin’s crazy hair and Madonna’s successful campaign against looking natural. I am not a fan of aging anyway, but thanks to the internet, well, let’s just say I’m really serious about moisturizing both day and night. Imagine some sort of new fangled headgear that allows you to shed the 20 years you fought so hard to put on starting at age 10.

Online celebrity culture and I have a real love/hate relationship. I love that it is quickly updated and always there to provide a brief reprieve from more important tasks, but I loathe its vapidity and the shame I feel for looking Reminiscently like I felt after my older brother and sister let me watch Porky’s in a hotel room at the tender age of 5.

Love it or hate it, online celebrity culture isn’t going anywhere, and in fact, its assimilation of your eyeballs, time and brain is even more ingrained. Consider MSN’s latest venture, Celebrifeed. Celebrifeed is a central repository for your favorite icon’s tweets and blog entries—if you want to know exactly how boring celebrities actually are, you can find out when they tell you about what they ate for lunch. Of course, running alongside will be supplemental material from reputable titles such as Us Weekly and Parade Magazine.

I’m going to do my best to stay far away from the likes of this. I already feel dumber and this might just push me over some sort of brink. Hats off though to you MSN for granting yet another destination, slightly rearranged, which will allow a few seconds shaved off a life.