The Search Engine Optimization company PageTraffic posted a list of the 500 most popular keywords on Google during 2022 (so far, anyway) on its web site.
As might be expected many of the top searches were clearly a way of accessing utilities that could be used for a great many different purposes in daily life (like e-mail and social media accounts usable for general communication, or means of online payment). A great many of the others also appeared to be related to the performance of essential daily tasks, like shopping (there were plenty of names of retail outlets here, in the main of a general nature; interest in bargains on used cars, used textbooks, etc.), and getting information related to that (as by checking price comparison sites, or finding directions to some place to which they needed to get, or the weather they would face going to work or going about their errands during the day).
When one got away from that to searches for information that was not necessarily being sought for some sort of immediate use one saw signs of at least a little interest in current events (manifest mainly in people going to favored news sites), and even a few particular news stories (generally associated with the cultural and political "fringe"--what most would call "conspiracy theory"-type stuff, or tabloid-type stuff). However, entertainment predominated, especially if one includes the numerous searches referencing celebrities and pornography under that heading. (Even where the keyword was not the name of some porn site or of some well-known fetish many of the searches were very, very specific, and the intent hard to mistake.)
Most of this seems predictable enough, but there were too surprises. I had a notion that, if most people are not intellectuals and their searches for information are mostly for stuff they can make practical use of immediately in their own lives, I thought that in looking for the immediately useful they would show themselves to be not merely "buyers," but "doers." I thought there would be more evidence of people seeking out, for example, health information, or wanting to know how to fix something, clean something, cook something. (WebMD did make the list, but it was not very high up that list, and I failed to notice anything else like it. One may imagine that some of those going to YouTube had an interest in its ample supply of "how-to" videos, but again, the keywords failed to make that clear--and I personally suspect people looking for YouTube generally rather than something specific on YouTube were going looking for amusement rather than to learn something.)
The other surprise was in the celebrities people were looking up. Those they searched for in 2022 were pretty much the same ones I would have expected them to be searching for in 2012 (Kim Kardashian, Taylor Swift, Scarlett Johansson, Anne Hathaway, Emma Watson, Miley Cyrus, Lindsay Lohan, Megan Fox)--and even 2002 (Jessica Alba, Jessica Biel, Jessica Simpson, Jennifer Aniston, Jennifer Love Hewitt, Britney Spears, Trish Stratus, Angelina Jolie, Natalie Portman, Alyssa Milano, Brooke Burke, Pamela Anderson, Carmen Electra, Jenny McCarthy)--as if none of those who have emerged since have captured the "public imagination" in the same way, even by comparison with them at this point in which the great majority of these personages would seem to be very, very far from the peak of their cachet.
Certainly plenty of people have remarked the decline of the movie star, but a decline of celebrity more broadly in the way implied here is something else. Could it be a function of the ever-more extreme fragmentation of popular culture? Or is something else going on?
What do you think, readers? (Lest there be any doubt about the matter that's not a rhetorical question, I really am inviting your comment in the thread below. If anyone is out there. The results I'm talking about didn't exactly raise my confidence in anyone being a reader of the kind of thing this blog happens to offer . . .)
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