On the Reality of Distant People
Am I the alien?
There was one of those dopey Twitter meme games going around this week where the prompt was “Without saying your age, who was your first celebrity crush?” People responded with photos and animated .gifs and as a result my timeline was full of random famous people for a week. Many of these made me feel old, as they were referencing people who didn’t become famous until I was in grad school.
This isn’t a game I participated in, though not because of the age thing— it’s a big Internet, and plenty of people posted images of people much older than I am. Rather, it’s just not a thing I ever did. “Celebrity crush” is a real “does not compute” kind of thing for me; not only can I not name my first, I would struggle to name any. I never really had that kind of strong quasi-sexual interest in anyone who might count as a “celebrity,” and in fact the whole concept is mildly baffling to me.
This is not, I don’t think, the result of a lack of emotions or interest— I had any number of strong crushes on schoolmates, and all that kind of awkward teen thing. I just never saw any point in having that kind of attachment to a famous person. That sort of attraction is reserved for real people, and celebrities aren’t real. Why would I take any interest at all, let alone a quasi-sexual one, in somebody who lives thousands of miles away from me, who I’m never going to meet?
The scope of that silly meme game, though—and, you know, several decades of living with an awareness of American pop culture and its boundless supply of carefully curated content about the personal lives of the rich and famous— suggests that this is very much a Me Thing. As always, I was mildly surprised by the number and variety of people who popped up in my timeline sharing .gifs of movie stars and musicians. Crushing on famous people is apparently a pretty universal phenomenon, for all that it’s baffling to me, personally. It’s the sort of thing where I end up asking myself “Am I the alien, here?”
By coincidence, at around the same time, this Substack post on whether friends made online count as “real” was getting a heavy push in the “Notes,” the Twitter-analogue that started the beef between platforms:
The collision of these two things was very interesting to me, because the reality of Internet friends is another area where I have strong opinions that have often diverged from the broader norm. I’ve made a lot of friends and acquaintances via the Internet, going back to the 1990’s. In fact, Kate and I met via a Usenet group, and started dating in 1998, when online dating was not remotely a Thing. In fact, at that time, telling someone at work that “I’m dating a woman I met on the Internet” would be followed by an awkward moment during which they were clearly trying to decide whether Kate was a serial killer, or if it was me.
(The alternative true statement about her when we started dating was “She’s an intern on Capitol Hill.” This was also a conversation-killer in 1998, during the Lewinsky scandal. Fun times, all around.)
So, I’ve never really had any doubt about the reality of “Internet friends,” though thirty years into the thing where I’m friends with people in distant places, this is still regarded as weird. By people who had crushes on pop stars, no less, which is a real head-scratcher for me.
I think the key factor that makes Internet friends real for me when celebrities are not is the existence of two-way interactions. I can talk to my Internet friends via email or Twitter DMs or whatever other messaging platform, and they’ll talk back. We can identify each other as being “our people,” in the terms of that linked post, and that provides a level of solidity to the relationship that is independent of physical distance. We can and do carry on a conversation, and the threads of that can be picked up relatively seamlessly when (or if) we eventually meet in “real life.”
Celebrities, on the other hand, allow for only one-way interaction, which holds relatively little interest for me. I can read content about them, but there’s essentially zero possibility of the give-and-take that characterizes real relationships with real people. Even in glossy magazine profiles that dish details of their personal lives, they’re not any more approachable than characters in a novel or a film. They’re vanishingly unlikely to ever know or care anything about me, and absent that mutual connection, I can’t attach any significant degree of reality to my relationship to them.
There’s a sense in which social media blurs this by a very tiny bit— there’s a chance that a tweet or an Instagram comment directed at a famous person might be acknowledged in some small fashion. It opens a very small possibility of entering an actual two-way conversation with one of these people, that might pop them into full three-dimensional reality. A tiny chance, granted, but still substantially better than was conceivable back in the days when celebrity magazines were the only game around. That probably contributes to the draw of these platforms, and also to their corrosive effect on the mental health of those who use them. Though as a maybe-alien, I might not be in the best position to evaluate that…
This is maybe a little noodle-y and self-indulgent, but that’s why I’m writing it on a lazy Saturday morning. If for some reason you like this kind of thing, here’s a button:
If you’d like to avail yourself of a small chance of achieving full reality on my solipsistic home planet, the comments will be open:
Apparently I'm the same type of alien that you are, except perhaps more so. As well as all the things you mention, I also prefer to avoid blogs etc. where I cannot respond to the author. My threshold for "worth reading" is much higher without the possibility of dialogue.
I wonder whether this post (inadvertantly?) hints at a key reason so many of us DID have celebrity crushes: no possibility of direct interaction meant no pressure to "make a move" and no danger of rejection. Lusting after, say, Winona Ryder or that "French in Action" woman was pleasurable in part because I didn't have to confront the complete inadequacy of my flirting/dating toolbox.