Monday, January 14, 2008

Why we care



Britney Spears is back; she opened the 2007 MTV Video Music Awards with her new single “Gimme More”. The song starts out with the interesting line of “Its Britney Bitch”, but no media outlet paid any attention to that, instead every media outlet was criticizing her dancing, singing and the fact that she had gained weight, over all trying to destroy her right after she came back into the music scene.

Now is it really fair to criticize Britney Spears about these things, without considering the fact that she hasn’t performed or sung in years and the fact that she has gained weight should not have been a surprise to anyone, because after having two children, that’s what usually happens. After her performance it was established that her dancing routine was changed last minute and during the performance her heel broke which affected her dancing, a video on youtube.com outlines what happened step by step. Unfortunately in today’s age, we live in a world where most of us do not take that extra initiative to research about what might have happened and why it was not all that great. Instead we take that first bit of information we receive from a certain media outlet and let it influence us how ever it likes.

Her singing, couldn’t have possibly been judged because she was lip singing, yet there were media outlets around the world criticizing Britney Spears about how her singing was horrible, by this misinforming people and as for her lip singing ability, it may have not have been all that great but after so many years of not performing it was expected.

Britney Spears’ weight gain seemed to be what most media outlets were focused on, but really should not have been focused on at all because after a woman has two children she usually gains weight. She may be a celebrity that has always been skinny and all but in reality she is human and is just like anybody else, who gains and loses weight. One reason that may have centered the attention to her weight may have been the outfit that she wore during her performance, which was very revealing. But did Britney Spears really gain that much weight that it deserved that much of the media’s attention, because if she was “fat”, society’s views on fat and skinny have drastically changed for the worse. In addition media outlets do not take into consideration how girls who look up to Britney Spears might see themselves because in reality Britney Spears was not fat at all; she was just not as skinny as people were used to seeing her in her earlier years.

I believe society loves to gossip about celebrities because they are fascinated about their rich lifestyles and most people really grow up with these people through the involvement the celebrities have in movies, music, magazines and so much more and they develop a certain bond with complete strangers. Magazines such as People, Us Weekly, Star, etc… in a way document the celebrities’ lives from the moment they become famous till the day that they die, and people who read these magazines learn a lot of personal things about the people whether they are lies or the truth, and some people become obsessed. It goes to extremes where people will do anything to meet this person they know nothing about, just what they have read in these magazines. The fascination with celebrities sometimes goes too far and people start to stalk celebrities and begin invading their personal lives, which then leads to court, restraining orders and even jail.

Now what does this “say” about us as people and as a society? Well in my opinion it says that we are people obsessed with the lives of complete strangers who have a lot of money. It is rather pathetic how people judge and talk about complete strangers, it just shows that their own lives aren’t enough for them and that they need to talk about others. This relates to the whole bullying issue, because people who gossip about celebrities are like school yard bullies picking on kids because they are unhappy with themselves. Over all people love gossiping about celebrities because they don’t have what the celebrities have, which is money & fame. We are a society that is run on jealousy and gossip, we need someone to pick on and talk about to make ourselves feel better because as people we will always want what we don’t have.




Outlining what went wrong





Unknown. "Britney Spears at the VMA's." Unknown. Online image.
http://blog.washingtonpost.com/celebritology/2007/09/instapoll_britneys_vma_perform_1.html. January 14 2007

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