It was reported in the Daily Mail (16/03/12) that reality TV star Kim Kardashian has more Twitter followers than President of the USA, Barack Obama.
The well known Kardashian sister, who is famous for ”being famous,” has an astonishing 5 million more followers on the social networking site than what is deemed to be the one of the most powerful men on the planet.
So what has made 14 million members of society follow one woman who seemingly has no known skills and only gained notoriety for the release of a sex tape. Are we a society revolving around celebrities and their lifestyles?
In July of last year, in the tragic wake of the Norway shootings, when deranged gunman Anders Behring Breivik stormed a youth camp and shot dead almost 100 people, there were complaints across the internet that the mainstream media made more hype of of troubled pop star Amy Winehouse’s death.
It was illustrated that the public concerned themselves more with the death of one chart topper in the spotlight than the massacre of almost 100 innocent citizens, most of whom were just in their teens.
Could it be that celebrities are people we relate to, and when they die it brings the inevitability of death all that bit closer? We hear about a certain celebrity on a daily basis and many people regard them almost as a member of the family, whereas the chilling events in Norway just seem so far away from home and not something that an average member of society can relate to.
Kendra Cherry who is author of ”The Everything Psychology Book” and writes the psychology guide for the New York Times Company, says: ‘When a famous person dies, even if it is someone we know relatively little about, someone we’ve previously paid very little attention to, we are still left with a feeling that we ”knew” that individual. It feels more personalised.’
To put the obsession simply, Kendra explains: ” That sense of familiarity might also explain why millions mourn the deaths of people like Steve Jobs and Whitney Houston while ignoring things like the Syrian uprising. Those events seem distant, faceless and anonymous.”
