Celebrity?

Why do I care what a celebrity thinks?

We get blitzed with these messages all day long. Famous athlete/muscian/actor endorses X. Unless it is something that is directly part of their success story (like a work out technique for an athlete) why would I care? Why should I care? Any random person on the street can give me a more honest recommendation, because they aren’t being paid to recommend it.

Now I am getting ads for books by celebrities. I just got an ad from Audible to start up my subscription again. The content of the ad was 3 books be celebrities, 2 actors and a musician. Clue Audible, you turned me off right there.

What is a celebrity?

Obviously someone that is known by a wide audience. Have a hit song, score the big win or be the star of that movie/play that everyone likes and you become a celebrity. We have influencers that grab followings online that become celebrities. There are other types, but I’ll set those aside for now.

So they are famous. These people have the attention of a large swath of the public. Does that make them an author of a good book? No. Nor does it make them an authority in anything. The fact of being a celebrity is worthless in and of itself. There is little about it that justifies sending their thoughts out into the world, let alone across time, yet we do.

Even when those people get their celebrity status from the occupation that I am interested in learning more about, the celebrity status should not give them the authority of being correct. Many years ago I listened to an audio book from Audible by a celebrity doctor. The first few chapters were interesting takes on biology that I knew little about. The chapter on electricity (an area where I have some certified knowledge) was so wrong and full of myth and misunderstanding that I had to discard everything from the book. If this celebrity doctor was so wrong about electricity I can only assume he was just as careless about the rest of his subjects. The book is still popular and I fear the content has caused problems.

The communicators

There are some people that get their celebrity status from being good in a field of study. More often than not those people are more “communicators” or “educators” in their field than thought leaders. Sometimes they are both, but rarely.

Let’s take some examples. When Steve Jobs died there were articles going on about how amazing he was as a technical genius. Around the same time Dennis Ritchie died and there was little coverage by comparison. If you don’t know, Ritchie was instrumental in developing Unix and invented the C programming language, both of which are at the heart of everything Apple makes today.

John McCarthy died around the same time and got even less coverage. He created the Lisp programming language, was an early innovator in AI and formed a large foundation for modern programming.

Now, by comparison Steve Jobs innovated on bringing a “style” to computing. Ritchie and McCarthy innovated by creating pillars that everything thing we do can stand on a firm foundation.

Why was the coverage so lopsided? Jobs had brought simple capabilities to the masses and communicated to them that they should use it. Is that a good justification? No, but it is what happened. We see the same thing happen in many other fields.

Maybe we should avoid the cult of personality.

Is there a reason that we need these cults of personality? Is “following” a musician going to improve the environment? If you say yes shouldn’t they be celebrities for their environmental work rather than their music?

What we enshrine says a lot about us as a society. We look back at the ancient civilizations and see philosophers and scientist more often than actors or athletes. Is that because the older societies are wiser then we are? Maybe.

Royalty and the rich would often sponsor big thinkers. More people know the names of those that were sponsored than the people that were doing the sponsoring. We should give credit to the sponsors as they did help us all, but the big thinkers were the people that really moved things forward.

What will historians say about our age as the information settles for it’s long trip into the future? Will we look like we invested too much in people that have glamour, or will there be a current of great achievements that rises out of the media? Let’s hope it’s the later.

At the same time, maybe we can do all of us and our descendants a favor by changing our concepts of celebrity before the eyes of history get to judge us. Why should an actor get more time in the limelight than say someone that is advancing fusion energy or cancer treatments? The only reason is that is what the media outlets think we want. If we tell them different maybe this blog entry will become irrelevant. I would be happy with that.