Whatever happened to living vicariously through people that actually had an element of cool about them? You know, like Frank Sinatra, or JFK, or Ali, or DiMaggio (I realize they're all dead or near-dead, but the point is that they mattered).
Hell, even Bill Clinton, or George Clooney or Madonna in the 90s. Today, we still have people who are worth following, I think...Richard Branson, Buffet, Daniel Craig, the Rock, etc...
I think the rise of Instagram and Facebook and Twitter is actually an indictment of celebrity power today. Are boilerplate standard Hollywood celebrities now so dull, predictable and "vanilla", that the only way to sate our desires to live vicariously through some other person is to actually find some person, any person (even just random Joe and Jane Q. Public types) and follow them on instagram or twitter? Are "celebrities" as we've all come to know them "passe", so to speak? Are they no longer cool enough for us?
Or are they just as cool today as they were yesterday, but in fact, we've become over-saturated with media surrounding regular hollywood celebrity archetypes and have burned out on their visage and behaviors and the coverage of such? Are we simply tired of them? Is it the "Playboy" syndrome (i.e. a different girl every month...or in this case, a different celebrity every month)? Is our craving for newness so insatiable that we'll follow anything new, even if it isn't very shiny? Are we really so good at deluding ourselves that random stuff we'd walk over on the street is now all of a sudden cool enough to waste our time on this earth "following"?
Is it celebrities who are sad? Or is it we, who are truly sad?
Have our standards for aspirational archetypes fallen so far that we'll de-base ourselves in such fashion and numbly follow our next door neighbors in some perverse, desperate attempt to feel something more exciting than what we feel about our own lives?
At least in the 50's, you could follow DiMaggio who hit a baseball like a god and bedded Marylin Monroe and hob-nobbed with the elite of american celebrity.
Now we follow Tuna the dog.
It's amazing what we'll settle for when push comes to shove.
