Who's Famous Now?

My subject is a rhetorical question, and I have no answer to it anyway. It seems that the 21st century is beginning as the century in which people have become famous without reason.....the reality TV cultural creation. I wonder what that says about us as a people, that we treasure nothingness above substance, that we create celebrity from a lump of coal and then believe the lump is gold.

Anyone can become famous now. Random people became famous for being famous in the first decade of the 2000's. Famous for being nothing is in now, as mediums promote the loudest and most boorish of fame seekers instead of those with talent. "Stars" these days don't need to have any real talent to become famous. The growth of reality television, celebrity bloggers and paparazzi combined with the speed of the Internet has created a mindless desire for gossip fed by an instant path to stardom for anyone who is brazen enough to degrade him or herself in seeking it the "reality way".

Have we, as individuals in society, lost the ability to be critical thinkers? We now tend to consume a lot of information that isn't important, and too little that really does impact our lives. What gets lost in that misperception is reality and substance, excellence takes a back seat to promotion. And what matters now is not what talent you have and expose, but rather how much of your personal life are you willing to expose. the more the reality star humiliates him or herself the brighter the star glows with the public. And the reality star who is a train wreck is particularly adored because so much of the public today takes satisfaction in seeing their pseudo stars melt down.

Maybe it's why so many more people today aspire to be celebs than inventors, engineers, scientists. teachers.... anything substance that requires hard work to achieve. But as we make unimportant people into important ones, do we miss what the really important ones are doing? And will this obsession with false idolatry increase or just be a passing fad?