Celebrity Gossip and celebrity scandal are everywhere. When it comes to stars and celebrities we love to talk about them. Not many people can resist a good old gossip preferable about someone that is known. Celebrity gossip and news can be found in magazines, on the radio, and on the television screen.
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 whore. 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.
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