Death in the celebrity age
Kottke's first line in this article asks "Are you worried about the future glut of obituaries in national newspapers?" And while I've never been worried about it, I have thought about it before. As Kottke points out, there are a lot more known people now than ever before. Basically, since it takes very little to become a celebrity in this world of a 24 hour news cycle, we're going to recognize the names of more people that die. Kottke's concept of multiple important people dying every day is interesting. Can you imagine what it will be like when someone like Harrison Ford or Tom Cruise dies? That will definitely be a cover on People, and if Brad Pitt becomes the anti-poverty crusader Angelina would have him be, he might get the cover of Newsweek as well.
One thing that struck me in this piece, though, is the fact that Kottke is assuming that we will always read paper newspapers. I'd bet newspapers of today will be unrecognizable in just 10 years. Which is a different post completely.
posted by Aaron Cohen at 11:31 PM
1 Comments:
That is something I hadn't thought of before. I wonder how likely it would be that multiple celebrities die in one day. I wonder with future medical advances that celebrities could afford, how long the life span of a celebrity will be. Our society has a tendency to marginalize elderly people. Will celebrities retire and fall out of the public eye... but then end up living for years so that people almost forget about them by the time they do die? What if all of our generation figures out how to post on our blogs even after we can no longer walk... Imagine what it will be like when all of the internet savvy people get old and really have nothing to do besides surf the web... of course, it probably will no longer be the internet as we know it...
11:25 AM
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