Celebrity Gossip is a great way to take a break from the more serious news that is found both locally and around the world. As a society we like to follow the actions of those celebrities we see in media. We talk about them. After all, do you really want to miss out seeing the next outrageous outfit that Paris Hilton is going to wear?

Do you feel a twinge of guilt about buying a gossipy celebrity magazine? Don’t. Tell yourself instead that you are merely honoring a respectable ancestral survival mechanism by engaging in celebrity gossip. This reveals lots about our culture. Celebrity gossip helps us tackle our social anxieties (what if we started breaking the rules like some Celebrity) and celebrity gossip tells us something about our dreams (only if I were to be rich and careless like Angelina).

Celebrity Gossip and our past.

Humans as a species live in groups, so it is essential for individuals to learn what other members of the tribe are up to and what this means. In our modern world with its instant communications celebrities make up part of that group. We feel we know them even if we have not even met them in real life. This drives us to engage in gossip about the celebrities. This begs the question :

Did celebrity gossip just start recently or has celebrity gossip been around for a long time?

Long ago reputations were important, we are talking, middle ages here, even more so than they are today. Women needed their husband to uphold their reputation – if a woman felt she was losing their husband, she would vocally accuse her competitor of trying to take him away by calling her a *****. You could even be punished for gossiping!

The punishment was various – but included a scold’s bridle, a metal band that fitted over the head and had a 3.5 inch protrusion which was inserted in the mouth and lay flat against the tongue. One sure way of making sure they did no more scolding.

Going back further. “If primate intelligence originally evolved to solve complex social problems, such as keeping track of shifting coalitions or countering against deception, then it’s possible that present-day human intelligence carries a legacy of this history”. So it seems that even in history mankind has been engaging in different forms of celebrity gossip.

Celebrity Gossip Today.

As we get to the point where we have less and less friends in common, the only way we can engage relationships and communication is to try to find people who are known to both of us – celebrities, public figures, sports stars, and media figures of all kinds. This allows us to gossip about a common theme – the well known celebrity. Now that communities include virtual ones, we engage in virtual celebrity gossip by e-mail, text or Internet. Most of the time this is for pure entertainment and the forming of social bonds. This need-to-know what happed to so and so could explain the enduring popularity of soap operas and other gossipy media. This human need for celebrity gossip was shown in Scotland in a recent human group experiment.

An interesting discovery about Celebrity Gossip

Scottish Psychologists devised a mind test similar to the game known as “Chinese whispers”,

They gave 10 volunteers four different texts to read, and then asked them to write down what they could remember. Their efforts were then passed to another set of volunteers as passages for them to learn, and the process was repeated four times.

The final version of the texts were then compared against the original – and the psychologists found that “celebrity gossip-like” information, involving deception and infidelity and the interactions of other people, was most easily remembered and relayed with the most accuracy.

However, the volunteers were hardly able to recall purely descriptive information about individuals or their surroundings. These results suggest that humans attach a high importance to personal and social data. Just the type of data we find when we engage in celebrity gossip. Could this information be used in the future to educate our children? Who knows but finding out about other people’s private lives and interactions is a key for human survival. We must also remember that celebrity gossip does have a serious side to it.

Celebrity Gossip and work

It’s all to do with being a human being. You simply will not survive unless you can gossip about the people you know, for a lot of us that means celebrities. We just love to exchange information about them and find out more about them. This need also comes to the fore at work.

In any organization, you’ve got a boss that’s one person you need to know about – their idiosyncrasies, their peculiarities and their relationships. As a result most office gossip is focused upwards – it’s looking up the hierarchy. This is another reason why we gossip about celebrities so much as they appear to be above us in the human hierarchy.

Celebrity Gossip and Public Relations

Some businesses use this information to great effect. In the Public Relations business it’s important to control the flow of information and when that information is released to the public. Public Relations companies need to know when and where to show the public important information about their clients who are incidentally often celebrities that they may be representing. Most importantly is where people gossip about celebrities.

To find out where this gossip takes place, one enterprising PR company compiled a top ten list of the places that people are most likely to engage in celebrity gossip…

Top 10 places to engage in gossip.

1. Restaurants

2. On the train or Tube

3. Friends telling friends

4. On our mobiles voice and text

5. At Meetings

6. In crowded bars

7. With the cabdriver

8. With their coach or personal trainer

9. Supermarket queues

10. Unisex toilets.

Do you see how those same PR companies use this information to target us. All those strange advertisements we see about upcoming celebrity events in train stations and on tube escalators, it gets us talking.

What if there was no gossip?

What would happen if we stopped gossiping about people? Just imagine if all celebrity gossip, were to stop tomorrow, what would we talk about? Who would we talk about?

Without celebrities or people we see as above us it would be an imperfect world – the most obvious reason is that about 80% of talk that occurs now, simply wouldn’t happen. That’s about how much of our conversation is celebrity gossip. Imagine no celebrities to gossip about! Society would break down, because the information we get from other people is fundamental to managing our relationships with them. We need to know who the friends, fools and the scoundrels are.

So to sum up we need to talk and to talk means to gossip. Celebrity gossip is a great way to take a break from the more serious news that is found around us. As a society we like to engage in celebrity gossip and follow the actions of those celebrities we see in the media light. It helps us bond. Celebrity gossip is here to stay. Just imagine seeing the next outrageous outfit that Paris Hilton is going to wear on the front of a magazine! Would you ignore it? Or talk about it?

By: Silveral

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