We’re all pretty bland in reality, but the reality TV shows don’t call if you are boring.

Personally bland, but acting Extreme

In order to be famous today, I can’t just be different, I must be EXTREME.

And fame is the name of the game in our celebrity obsessed world.  A series of studies recently have identified this interesting shift in our culture–especially with respect to younger kids.

A survey of 5 – 11 year olds in Britain found that the top three career aspirations were sports star, pop star and actor, compared with teacher, banker and doctor 25 years ago.

And really, are we surprised?  The web has opened up an entirely new world of 24/7, always on celebrity culture.  Kids can access a celebrity’s every move instantly via Twitter and feel like a complete insider.  The “Entertainment News” gossip media has exploded over the past 10-15 years.  Kids are constantly exposed to some new star doing something crazy to get attention.  Many ultimately end up modeling this behavior, seeing fame as a way to earn respect (see the Mirror Effect for details).

Marketers watch these trends in celebrity gossip “news” and how it impacts youth culture.  They see how new (& old) media has gone bonkers for celeb., covering ever drunken stupor, every fight, every rehab visit (with an increasingly wanton disregard for what happens to the celeb in the end).  The more extreme, the better the new media logic seems to say.  So, even more marketing communication is created to help people eat what they eat, wear what they wear, etc.

And then, the self help community promotes the idea of building a personal brand.  Use the web to create a personal persona and maybe, just maybe you’ll get famous too, we’re told.  Having a personal purpose and standing for something is great, but when it crosses over into pure focus on image–we’re in trouble.

New/old media, marketers & the self-help gurus all help build this cult of celebrity (or celebrity industrial complex) that we’re suffocating under in our culture…and we don’t even notice it because it feels just, well, normal.

Encouragingly, some stars have been reflecting on the cult of celebrity gripping our youth today.  John Mayer wrote a very honest blog post here that is quite insightful and captures the zeitgeist of the celebmania were living with today.

It is also great to see an uptick in stars turning their fame into support for good causes as they work to clean up their image and become better role models.

In the end though, we’ll need widespread social change to seen an eventual reversal of the upward spiral of extreme behavior in the name of headline grabbing.  I’m not sure what will trigger that.  Any thoughts?

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