Did Celebrity Narcissism Kill Celebrity?

In discussing the decline of celebrity it is a commonplace to remark the many, many "faux pas" of the famous, and how all these have been amplified in the age of a 24/7 news cycle heavy on infotainment, and then online life with its social media and propensity for three hour tempests-in-a-teacup over absolutely nothing that all the same have their effect on perceptions. The narcissism of many a celebrity has been a factor here, of course, but I suppose that where most apparently identify this with a celebrity's more obviously unpleasant behavior--their exploding in rage on some occasion when the help didn't jump fast enough for the sake of catering to one of their petty whims (Coming next summer: Kanye West on a Plane!), or perhaps flakily throw their pampered existences in our faces in an Ugh-I-can't-pretend-to-be-someone-who-makes-twenty-five-thousand-a-year sort of way (says the literally-won-an-Oscar-for-pretending Gwyneth Paltrow)--this has not been its only dimension by any means, with much else that they do reflecting the same narcissism, and if not quite so obviously, making these figures wearisome.

One way is the insistence of so many of them on the whole world acknowledging them as three-dimensional human beings, and indeed, brilliant Renaissance Men and Women blessed with all the talents. Not content to be seen simply as a Master Thespian, and star of stage, screen and television, they insist that each and every human being on the planet Earth also validate them as, for example, an equally gifted and accomplished writer, director, musician, painter, martial artist, scientist, aviator, political analyst, humanitarian, activist, philanthropist, and of course, "entrepreneur." I don't have a problem with their doing other things, of course--it's a fine thing to try one's hand at different things, to stretch themselves, and finer still when people succeed at it, as sometimes they do, and few have so much opportunity. Nor are they obliged to be secretive about their "extracurriculars." Rather the issue is how strident they so often are about demanding the public's acknowledgment of their accomplishment on the basis of the most marginal, even flimsy, claims in all of these other areas, in spite of, again, their extreme privilege conferring on them opportunities of which many an aspirant scarcely dares to dream (as seen in the case of James Franco, the star of Zeroville and Why Him?, director of such masterpieces of world cinema as Future World). And of course, when they have been something else of note they never lets anyone forget. (Ever notice how it seems that Arnold Schwarzenegger can't go for two seconds in an interview without shoehorning into the conversation that he was "Governor of California?" As when, telling us that he wasn't in Terminator 4 reminding us entirely gratuitously that this was "Because I was Governor of California?")

Meanwhile they very readily decide that their life's journey is so unique, and reflective of such an exceptional personality, that while still far from retirement they not only insist on putting out a memoir, but make it double as a self-help book, a guide to living for all the Little People--in which doing the extreme opposite of what they apparently intend they actually reveal themselves not to have grown one iota as a human being since they, for example, started that feud with their colleague on the set of that sitcom they were in thirty years ago, before going on to ruin what was supposed to be the Big Night they had awaited for decades and pressed for by throwing a years-long tantrum by slapping the host of the awards ceremony right on camera before a disbelieving world that initially thought it was just a stunt to enliven a ceremony in desperate need of enlivening, and then having to devote their acceptance speech to a humiliating excuse for an apology as they hold their little statuette, with the result that it's pretty much all anyone can remember about that particular year's Oscars--including who it was that won Best Actor. (I suppose you can supply the relevant example yourself in this case, certainly to go by how in the run-up to the release of Bad Boys 4 people were, of course, asking "Does he get slapped in the movie?")

Even paying as little attention to the stupidity of public figures as I possibly can without hanging it all up and living completely off of the grid just yet I feel myself hit over the head with it again and again, and I don't imagine myself the only one to feel that way. But what seems to me even more relevant from the standpoint of how this may have undermined celebrity is how much it is at odds with that larger-than-life one-dimensionality that is the foundation of the concept--or even just the old adage that it's better to remain silent and be thought a fool than open one's mouth and remove all doubt. The result is that these fools so favored by fortune are not just too overexposed to allow for the old mystique, but also personally too obtuse, too unruly, too "Me, me, me" to adopt the public persona that celebrity conventionally required--ironically, even though the fame of so many of these personages literally rests on their claim to being able to play a part better than us nobodies watching at home, endlessly being assured that it isn't the nepotism of which they were such colossal beneficiaries but the raw talent and "hard work" that put them in a position to annoy not just a limited circle of personal acquaintances but the whole world with their idiocies.

The Rhythms and Texture of the TV of Yesteryear

Older TV--TV from before our prestige TV-dominated era--certainly had its particular rhythms and texture that, even when the show isn't black-and-white, or its age given away by ostentatiously period elements (like a cast swathed in eye-offending polyester), is produced by those elements of television production that one is much less likely to see in any recent show. The often leisurely opening credits sequences presenting the cast in a montage set to a theme song. The narratives that would unfold with their dramatic beats timed to coincide with cuts to commercial and run their course within the span of a single episode's running time (save for those occasions when we would realize that the story couldn't be wrapped up in the very little time remaining and, sure enough, the words TO BE CONTINUED appeared on the screen in the final, frozen, frame). The tendency of such narrative toward a procedural format (the cops cracking the case of the week, the doctors resolving the medical emergency of the week), and frequently to the making of episodes that were a 45-minute low-budget version of some feature film "everyone" had already seen (which movie had almost always "done it better," usually much, much better). The "canned audience" track that not only automated the whole range of claqueur's sounds but enabled the viewer to experience that range at home as if they were in a theater (as immortalized in such masterpieces as "Sounds of the '80s Studio Audience").

Alongside the rhythms and texture of single episodes were the rhythms and texture of whole seasons, and even a show's run. Their fall-to-May seasons with their predictable alternation between new episodes and reruns organized around premieres, finales and "sweeps" periods, the latter of which tended to promise something "special" to the audience such as some character being in mortal danger and maybe not making it, their enlivening particular episodes with "special guest stars" (perhaps playing themselves, perhaps not), their seasonal episodes where some character learned "The true meaning of winter" of somesuch, episodes where a character asked "Remember when?" and started the whole group reminiscing in a manner dramatized by bits of past episodes and we realized that rather than a "proper" new episode what we were getting was (yet another) budget-stretching clip show--and of course, a lot of "Will they, won't they?" crapola about a pair of characters of whom one is obviously romantically interested in the other from episode one but due to an endless series of obstacles that the writers all too obviously contrived solely for the purpose of keeping them apart (she's finally realized she has feelings for him, too, but here he is dating a different woman, until he isn't anymore but now she's involved with someone else) they don't have their first date until season seven (often, after the audience had long since stopped caring). There was too how, as shows wore on, they would replace audience favorite characters and actors with new ones that people usually liked less than the original and in the end never got around to accepting, and in the process (just like those gimmicky episodes where at the end we found out that "It Was All a Dream") made it all the more obvious to everyone but the desperately-in-denial network executives that a show had run longer than it ought to have done.

All if this must seem antediluvian today in that way that draws sneers from those overgrown obnoxious "cool kids" who dominate professional reviewing of pop cultural crap--all as someone to whom it isn't probably wouldn't say that they loved all of it. (I certainly won't.) Still, even its worst wasn't a complete barrier to laughter, dramatic substance or intelligent storytelling, just as those of us who can see through the claquing-gone-mad of the critics, the cinema grade-caliber production values and the pretentious tricks and turns that inspire such respect in the Midcult-gobbling middlebrow mind to what prestige TV has actually offered (or not), the absence of those things do not guarantee laughter, dramatic substance or intelligent storytelling. Such that people continue to watch many of them today, over and over again, as the ballyhooed prestige TV shows after airing their last episode commonly cease to hold any interest for those who had once (or so we were told) breathlessly followed--leaving the critics scratching their heads over their continuations in some other form's failing to draw an audience, as when, contrary to the idea that The Sopranos was going to replace oxygen as the thing we need to breathe in order to live, few felt that they had to go back for more when The Many Saints of Newark hit theaters.

The Victim of Marginal Worthiness

As Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky showed in their classic of news media criticism Manufacturing Consent, a single critical detail can crash the supposed worthiness of a victim--with their examples showing how the mainstream media's regard for the life of a Catholic priest murdered by state forces plummets 99 percent if the state forces responsible for the murder were Anti-Communist rather than Communist, all as a great many victims of a great many contemporary evils would be considered even less "worthy" than even the priest killed by a right-wing death squad.

There are an enormous number of angles to the matter of this long spectrum extending from absolute and extreme worthiness to the kind of absolute unworthiness that represents not a 99 percent+ drop in attention from one end of the spectrum to the other, but a 100 percent drop--because their sufferings rate no acknowledgment whatsoever (as is, arguably, the lot of the vast majority of categories of people on this planet, and their causes of death). One that may escape the notice it ought to have is the situation of the victim who is not totally dismissed as unworthy, but perhaps enjoying a very marginal worthiness, and straining to hold on to that and improve on that--and the standard of behavior expected of them even by those who are prepared to say in public that they are not totally unworthy.

It seems to me that one can think about the difference between those who are treated as unquestionably worthy and those who are treated as only marginally worthy in this way: Who is allowed to show anger, even rage, over how they have been mistreated, and who is required at all times to display the utmost restraint in the face of the severest insults and provocations rather than responding to their tormentors the same way they have spoken to them, ever taking the "high road" as others snipe at them from the "low?" While no one argues for hatred as a healthy or constructive emotion, who is allowed to admit that the abused are apt to feel hatred toward those who have abused them, that one can bear such feeling even when they are fighting justly for their rights, and that others must show some understanding of that--and who destroys whatever sympathy others had for them with the least hint that they may harbor any impure feeling whatsoever? In short, when the victim in question lapses in "right" thought, speech and action, whom do we make excuses for as we continue to insist on their worthiness, and whom do we subject to cold, sanctimonious moralizing when they show themselves an ordinary mortal rather than the saint we require them to be if we are to show them any consideration at all?

It is those who are deemed unquestionably worthy who get all the understanding, while those on the edge of worthiness and trying not to get further away from that edge of whom the adherents of conventional wisdom make a non-negotiable demand for impeccable conduct, while forgiving no failures to adhere to the standard whatsoever--perhaps because they are looking for any excuse to not care, or perhaps simply be frank about their not caring, and getting others to not care, and very well aware that holding the victim to an impossible double standard must inevitably provide them with that excuse they so obviously want, indeed can even seem desperate to have? Because they have an agenda that open indifference, or opposition, and promotion of the same in others, will serve? And indeed, in their relentless search after excuses to condemn, not only act like a bearer of hatred, but actually hate them, another enemy of the victims differing from those who openly attack them in that openness (with the feeling likely to be less well-hidden than they think it is)? Yet those in that position of "marginal worthiness" are very likely to feel that they have no practical alternative to playing a cruel game rigged against them as well as they can--in this way as in so many others "choice" really "dilemma," and least-worst the best they can hope for from the selection of options available to them.

Hard Evidence of the Declining Relevance of Blogging?

According to Wikipedia, "[a]n n-gram is a sequence of n adjacent symbols in a particular order"--for instance, that particular order of adjacent symbols that are the letters making up a word or phrase, which is the kind of sequence with which I am concerned at the moment. The Google Books' "Ngram Viewer" measures the frequency of the use of a word or phrase in the vast body of digitized books in that system over time, which the Viewer presents in the form of a graph for the share the word or phrase of the amassed texts by year going all the way from 1800 to 2022. This makes looking at the figures the Viewer provides for particular keywords a handy way of seeing whether particular subjects or ideas have come to be more or less widely discussed over time which I have found consistent with my experience. For example, it seems telling that the Ngram viewer scores for the terms "woke," "new normal" and "remote work" exploded in recent years--and "narcissism" and "kakistocracy" too--all as usage of the term "democratic peace theory" fell hard over a period in which the end-of-history delusions of the post-Cold War period receded into the past.

Considering just where blogging stands in our online life today it seemed plausible that the Ngram viewer could provide some insight, and so I went ahead and plugged in "blog" and "blogosphere"--the latter term, denoting the totality of blogs, and those who interact with them, understood by its users to comprise a space, a culture both revealing and formative of public opinion in sufficient degree that what is going on in said "sphere" matters. As it happened the use of the word "blog" peaked in 2012 with a score of 0.00076, and plunged all the way through the following decade, with a score of 0.00057 for the last recorded year, 2022--a rough one-quarter drop in incidence. The fall in the usage of that derivative of "blog," "blogosphere," was even more pronounced. Peaking in 2011 with a score of 0.000028 in 2022 its score stood at 0.0000096--a two-thirds drop in incidence.

It does not seem wholly unreasonable to infer from this that blogs are less spoken of, and the blogosphere much less spoken of, by book authors after 2011-2012 because blogs singly and the blogosphere generally simply became less important to our online life afterward--the more in as this judgment would seem to align with a great deal of other information and analysis about the character of online life today. For the same reason I would imagine that the fall in the words' Ngram scores did not bottom out in 2022, but continued through 2023, 2024 and 2025, and that we will see this confirmed when scores become available for those years--and the years after them as the results of the search engine algorithm changes, the turning of many from search engines to answer engines, and a good many other developments in the way in which we access the web increasingly register in the ever-lagging analysis. This will not be because those developments will have compelled those who think about any relevant matter to think about the blog's importance, but simply because it will be less and less the case that the blog, let alone the collectivity of the blogosphere, will force themselves on their attention. Still less will they give any thought to the bigger story of which the withering of blogging is merely a part--namely the death of what little hope there had ever been for the democratization of participation in our cultural and political life via the "actually existing" web. The plain and simple fact of the matter is that the great majority of the members of that very small social stratum which is in a position to write books that may actually get read has never cared for that hope, indeed seen it as a threat, maligned it endlessly in their public statements, and I suspect, to the extent that they think about the matter at all now, gloat over what has come to pass as they hail the Overlords of Big Media and Big Tech whose, in lieu of a more accurate but less socially acceptable term, claqueurs and courtiers they are.