Celebrity culture | The Perfect Response

Our consumer culture focused on marketing comes with a shift in our attention toward the presentational image, and away from thoughtful character assessment.

We may be entering a time when it makes more sense to chronicle what has been lost rather than gained. This seems to be the case in the slow but persistent decline in the assessment of personal character and the concurrent rise in the culture’s devotion to celebrity. These features are of a somewhat different nature, but there are benefits to pairing them.

Traits of good character haven’t changed much. The values of honesty, integrity and empathy will not disappear. But they are not on the surface of the culture in our era of communication through imagery. In the case of our culture of celebrity, it is now so tangible it can overwhelm us, making the display of aspirational success a feature of everyday life. In simple terms, integrity as a value has been obscured by the quest for notoriety.

Our media has shifted to being more about the presentation than description, more about recognition than sustained and unpublicized accomplishment. We want images that display “success” rather than discursive content that invites assessment. The difference is evident in the awareness and acknowledgement of the basic decency one friend over the invitation for envy in the self-display another sends in the form of an image in an online post. The first is more genuine and cerebral; the second carries characteristics of display that moves it closer to becoming a “brand.” These pathways are different, but the second is now a dominant narrative of validation tied to the American lexicon of marketing. What “looks good” can be better than being good.

By definition, a celebrity is someone who is known for being well known, even when the achievements of that person may be quite modest. The next step in this chain of public recognition is endowing a person with a public persona that can be branded, meaning widely recognized and probably monetized. Advertising frequently seeks to personalize things, turning anything from sunglasses to coffee machines into signifiers attached to a person to be emulated. In short, products are often sold as celebrity stand-ins. We see signature shoes, and athletic gear in the context of endorsements. A person “known for” their curated persona creates their own force field of attention. Branding depends on this tenuous association factor, attracting scores of emulators. Niccolò Machiavelli’s famous observation about the nature of a public self could be the mantra of a self-publicist: “Everyone sees what you seem to be, few know what you really are; and those few do not dare take a stand against the general opinion.” If nothing else, Donald Trump has nurtured a brand based on obvious memes of wealth and business acumen. Indeed, a person could fill a Dollar Store with his overpriced merch offering ersatz symbols of affluence: shoes, perfume, ties, steaks, lapel pins, bibles, etc. etc. They are enough to capture voters who want to demonstrate their allegiance by owning some of “his” totems of ersatz prestige. With more effort, a reader with a livelier mind can also discover his habit of stiffing contractors, off-loading debt and declaring bankruptcies in his casino businesses. But this record is obviously not part of the brand that he has successfully promoted to the public.

The more one consumes impressions through the branding mechanisms of the marketplace, less attention is will be paid to character.

Here is the challenge our culture faces. Too often our distractions leave us with only enough time to carry away impressions rather than deeper understandings. What has changed over the generations is the ascendance of the imagery of marketing as a tool for shifting our attention away from personal merit and, with it, creating less space to exercise the language and critical applications of character assessment. A preoccupation with cultural products attached to public figures leaves diminished energy for the work of judging others on their authentic achievements.

Classically, the guiding principle for assessing a person’s value to society was in understanding these clearly roadsigned merits. What useful talents do they possess that furthers opportunities of others? How well can they distinguish between what is best for many rather than just oneself? Do they know what excellence looks like? Is there a solid moral core that shapes their efforts to achieve it? Do they have a level of judgment we would want for our own children? These are the kinds of foundational questions thought leaders like Plato and Aristotle, or John Locke and Thomas Jefferson pondered. All would have been comfortable assessing a person’s character in terms of their evident knowledge, generosity to others, and what we know today as “social intelligence.” Their understandings of human potential were far more subtle than our culture-wide retreat towards self-interested promotion.

In our current culture of appearances we have left most of these kinds of questions on the table, replacing them with impressions built more on recognition than merit. Branding mechanisms of the marketplace may conceal who is truly a figure worthy of emulation.

Frieze of Columbus in the New World, US Capitol — **^{Frieze of Columbus and Indigenous Americans in the New World, US Capitol Rotunda}**

There is truth in the irony that our most cherished possession is not exclusively ours to own.

We think that our most precious possessions are the things we have acquired or the relationships we have. But for many people the “right” to tell their own story looms just as large. Narratives of our personal or tribal lives may be the keys to understanding who we are and where we came from. But in fact they are not exclusively ours to tell. We don’t have proprietary rights to our own personal histories.

This is both self-evident and enormously consequential. It’s not just that we can’t easily agree even about the foundational stories about our collective past. What Christopher Columbus or Thomas Jefferson or Abraham Lincoln actually achieved will always involve contentious narratives. We can also be unpleasantly surprised by accounts of ourselves offered even by friends or relatives.

It’s apparent that anyone can write someone else’s biography. Even biographers who are out of favor with their subjects or never met them are frequently eager to weigh in with their own versions. For example, we are presently surrounded by multiple narratives that recreate the life of Apple co-founder Steve Jobs. There’s Walter Isaacson’s 2011 best-selling biography (Steve Jobs, 2011) and the forthcoming Aaron Sorkin film based on it. Both recognize Job’s vision for turning computing into a necessary life skill. And both portray a garage innovator with a knack for ingenious design and an inability to acknowledge his co-visionaries. Then there’s Alex Gibney’s very different documentary (Steve Jobs: The Man in the Machine, 2015) detailing a single-minded marketing genius reluctant to engage with the unpleasant facts surrounding the Chinese factories that produce Apple products. Amazon currently lists about ten books on Jobs. The point is that we can count on each version to offer a different person to readers.

The same is true for groups that seek power or legitimacy in the larger culture by presenting what are sometimes very different accounts about their pasts and their aspirations. What’s the story of Scientology? It depends on who you ask. How has the institutional life of Catholicism evolved since revelations of widespread child abuse were widely reported at the beginning of the new century? Skeptics and admirers routinely compete for attention to relay their stories. In many ways the fissures that are spread across the culture deepen over time, often expanding into complete fault lines as interested parties vie for media access to “get their story out.”

There’s a whole lexicon of useful terms to represent these divisions. We talk not only about “narratives,” but also “contested narratives,” “counter-narratives,” “preferred narratives,” “backstories,” “storylines,” “myths,” “legends,” “lore,” “rumors” and “histories” that are disputed as “more fiction than fact.” Facebook champions an individual’s own preferred narrative: a kind of carefully constructed window display of one’s life. Most other digital outlets focusing on the culture of celebrity capture readers by taking a very different turn: favoring counter-narratives and backstories. Sometimes they are even true.

Novelists who would seem to have the advantage of exclusive use of the products of their imagination are inclined to end up in tangles of their own making when readers find possible connections to the writer’s biography. Readers can also be unforgiving if a scribe borrows another’s particularly traumatic narrative. A few years ago the prolific Joyce Carol Oates came under criticism in New Jersey for embellishing on a news story about a college student found dead in a campus garbage container. The short story, Landfill, was published in the New Yorker, to the chagrin of the student’s family and others in the region.

For all of our hope that our stories can be communicated in ways that bring us the credit we seek, the fact is that we can never claim rights to exclusivity. Ask anyone who has recently been in the news how well their views have been represented or how they were characterized. You are apt to get a response of mild frustration. What we see in ourselves is probably not what those who retell our stories are going to report. For individuals or groups without power this is sad to witness. Groups lose something basic when they lack the means to communicate their preferred narratives. The rest of us battle on, even occasionally discovering a narrative that gives us far more credit than we deserve.

Comments: woodward@tcnj.edu

The Perfect Response

EFFECTIVE COMMUNICATION IN A DISTRACTED AGE

Tag Archives: Celebrity culture

Who Gets to Tell Our Story?