A SURE sign that I’m failing to keep abreast of the zeitgeist is a recent colour appointment at the hairdresser’s (referred to by my female contemporaries as “getting the tramlines filled in”.)
Having forgotten to bring newspapers or a book, I’m presented with a pile of magazines to while away the lengthy process that is base colour and two sets of highlights.
With sinking heart I realise they’re all issues of Hello! magazine. I turn the pages in desultory fashion.
“International rapper A and his glamorous television celebrity wife B, relaxing in their lovely home,” – a nightmare of pseudo-classical architecture with all the comfort of a mausoleum.
“Soap star X and her business tycoon partner relaxing abroad on their super-yacht in Barbados.” Hello? Who are these people? I’ve never heard of them.
Do they ever do anything but relax? Page after page of celebrity weddings, black-tie events, couture outfits, designer dogs, designer babies and endless witterings-on about how simple their tastes, how ordinary their lives are.
The cult of personality is the curse of modern communication. Why should we believe that the actor, the entertainer or the sportsperson, the well-born, rich (whether by talent or accident,) or just famous for being famous, have anything original, wise, or philosophical to say?
Yet, smitten by celebrity, we hang upon their lips. The ether is saturated with amateur bloggers and twitterers who’ve climbed on the bandwagon, spewing time-and-energy-wasting inanities, creating a tower of Babel for our times.
The public’s appetite for this kind of drivel is insatiable. Our popular media is gradually falling victim to a creeping ethos of spectacle, scandal, exploitativeness and cheap sensationalism – junk food for the mind.
As technology gallops ahead of us, fewer people are gleaning hard news from newspapers, favouring instead television, radio and the internet. An increasing number of 20-35 year olds no longer buy a daily paper and a significant percentage of teens rarely watch news at all.
Print journalism has had to adapt to a fickle market. The high-circulation British tabloids, operating on the principle of giving the public what it wants, are awash with trivia, gossip and speculation.
The pictures grow longer, the text shorter and analysis of the serious issues is scarce as hens’ teeth. One daily in a class of its own adopts a permanent tone of political and social indignation and panders to its large female readership with features like ‘Should you be removing the hair from your forearms?’ and ‘How to get everything you want by just wishing for it’.
The ‘big picture, short text’ virus has infected some of our weekly published local papers giving us half a dozen pages of news and the issue bulked out with imported features, sport, advertising and multiple photographs of local people enjoying themselves at social functions and in pubs.
Even the ‘quality’ papers have had to adapt. Though their political and current affairs analysis is sharp as ever, features and opinion pieces are on the increase to boost circulation.
And circulation is dropping across the board. The (English) ‘Independent’ has ceased to print and is only available online since last month.
The very serious ‘Guardian’ in a populist gesture, devotes a lighthearted page in its weekend magazine to interviews with celebrities, actors, writers, no riff-raff.) Twenty random questions prove extraordinarily revealing of character. For some interviewees it’s a glorious ego-fest.
Example: Q. Is it better to give or to receive?
A. “Apart from awards, it’s best to give.”
Q. If you could bring back something extinct, what would you choose?
A. “Myself.”
The question ‘What’s the most important thing life has taught you?’ generated such original pensées as “Don’t sweat the small stuff.”
Author Bill Bryson took the biscuit by responding “that there’s no explaining the popularity of Mrs Brown’s Boys.”
Where does one find integrity in this society? Despite the hammering the press has taken in recent years, it’s still subject to regulations, run by professionals and our most reliable, responsible and reflective source of news. The alternative doesn’t bear thinking about.
