Celebrity Culture
Celebrity Culture has many different definitions and interpretations on its meaning, considering everyone has their own personal view on it, I define it as changing your thoughts, ideas, and the way you react to things based on the people that we pay high attention to. We often get an emotional attachment to these people. We fall in love with who they are and when they make any sort of mistake or bad judgment we often lash out because we are truly hurt or even offended. With celebrity culture we attack those who misuse their privilege with the help of social media. For example when a celebrity says or does something against our beliefs or what we see as morally wrong the internet tends to take over and call out he or she in any way possible. Our society can even do this to those who are not a celebrity or hold any higher power as seen in the video of Justine Sacco.
In the Justine Sacco incident we saw a average women in today's world who had around 170 followers on twitter turn into a celebrity within minutes, due to a tweet that was taken out of context and used against her. The tweet went along the lines of "I am traveling to Africa in hopes of not catching aids, but I won't because I am white." Within seconds Justine became the #1 trending topic on twitter. Everyone began bashing her for what they saw as an insulting tweet. People wanted her to lose her job and enjoyed tearing her down via social media. Celebrity culture sometimes leads to situations like this to where we take someone with little to no power and give them lots of power by bashing them for going against our beliefs or what we find acceptable and also even turning them into a celebrity at times by people tagging along and following people into the bashing of a person. This then creates a very powerful world that we control. Celebrity culture has the ability to make anyone powerful as long as we give attention to them. With Justine Sacco she got power quickly and negatively. Celebrity culture affects our lives everyday.
