Why Celebrity Gossip Has Become America's Favorite Addiction
A San Francisco Chronicle web columnist named Mark Morford recently responded to an abundance of e-mails the paper gets from readers that complain about headline choices. Why is it, they ask, that Britney (whose last name needn't be mentioned, because, face it, everyone knows who she is) gets more face time than soldiers and ecological disparities do? His response, purely and simply, is that the amount of visits to the link about Britney's custody loss far superseded the amount of visits to links about the Blackwater crisis. He says it reached a point where the server nearly crashed. As a business, Morford says, the Chronicle responded by giving readers what they wanted: more Hollywood, less war.
New Scientist magazine reported in 2003 that one-third of Americans suffer from something called "celebrity-worship syndrome" (CWS), and noted that the population of sufferers continues to increase. This "syndrome" has since transformed into a psychological disorder, a standard description of celebrity fanaticism, used by academics and searchable on sources like Wikipedia.
The same article mentioned that a man named James Houran and a group of his colleagues were credited with the establishment of CWS after they conducted a survey called the Celebrity Attitude Scale (CAS) to determine levels of fan zeal. The survey asked volunteers agree or disagree with a series of 34 statements like, "I love to talk with others who admire my favorite celebrity," and established a multilevel syndrome that made celebrity gossip addiction less black-and-white than it used to be. It differentiated between those who skim People magazine features in line at the grocery store and those like the priest recently accused of stalking Conan O'Brien.
New Scientist magazine reported in 2003 that one-third of Americans suffer from something called "celebrity-worship syndrome" (CWS), and noted that the population of sufferers continues to increase. This "syndrome" has since transformed into a psychological disorder, a standard description of celebrity fanaticism, used by academics and searchable on sources like Wikipedia.
The same article mentioned that a man named James Houran and a group of his colleagues were credited with the establishment of CWS after they conducted a survey called the Celebrity Attitude Scale (CAS) to determine levels of fan zeal. The survey asked volunteers agree or disagree with a series of 34 statements like, "I love to talk with others who admire my favorite celebrity," and established a multilevel syndrome that made celebrity gossip addiction less black-and-white than it used to be. It differentiated between those who skim People magazine features in line at the grocery store and those like the priest recently accused of stalking Conan O'Brien.
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