Addict Nation (14 page)

In a world where we realistically cannot throw our smartphones out the window, it really becomes about managing the gray areas by setting boundaries. For example, on weekends, I try to rely on my personal BlackBerry, figuring if there’s a crisis at work, they’d know to call me on my personal phone. I also have learned to put my BlackBerrys on silent when I go into a twelve-step meeting or a solemn situation such as a funeral. Frankly, I learned that the hard way. It seems nobody wants to hear my “I Kissed a Girl” ringtone erupt as they’re reciting the eulogy.

Multitasking . . . Really?

Here’s the really big question. Is all this instant communication really making us more productive, or could it simply be overwhelming us with a tsunami of data? The company-supplied smartphone is said to give employers a massive return on their investment in the devices. Suddenly, they have workers who are making the most of previously dead time, furiously e-mailing in the elevator, while they’re walking the halls, and even in the bathroom.

Most of us, in this Information Age, engage in some form of digital juggling. When I’m at work, I’m constantly jumping between two TV sets on two different news networks, two BlackBerrys with different e-mail lists, and a computer desktop with all sorts of other data, like news scripts and wire copy, not to mention that quaint, bulky phone with the old-school receiver on my desk. What can I say? Screen media is seductive. They made it that way!

There are times when I can feel overwhelmed and even a tad disoriented. Call it the “where was I?” syndrome. When I stop one task, my mind has to exit from that subject and approach the other task. Then, when I return to the initial subject, I have to reorient my mind and figure out where I left off. All of that takes time and energy. Constantly dipping in and out of different subjects and hopping from one communication device to another can be a time waster that can create a synthetic form of attention deficit disorder. There is growing evidence now that more and more people are superficially skimming reading material as opposed to really studying a piece of writing from beginning to end.

Is the Breadth of Our Knowledge
Expanding at the Expense of Its Depth?

The progressive nature of addiction is accelerating all these trends. It often seems that we have all been duped into becoming slaves to shiny gadgets just to make very rich people even richer. Our world is becoming smaller as we increasingly focus on the intricate, little gizmo in our hands, ignoring the big, exciting world around us. Meantime, the more information about ourselves we surrender, the more ammunition we give cyberpushers to control and manipulate us.

In the
Atlantic
, Nicholas Carr has a fascinating article entitled “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” He writes, “The faster we surf across the Web—the more links we click and pages we view—the more opportunities Google and other companies gain to collect information about us and to feed us advertisements. Most of the proprietors of the commercial Internet have a financial stake in collecting the crumbs of data we leave behind as we flit from link to link—the more crumbs, the better. The last thing these companies want is to encourage leisurely reading or slow, concentrated thought. It’s in their economic interest to drive us to distraction.”

It’s ironic that the baby boomer generation would have heralded the age of digital multitasking and websurfing. It’s the antithesis of the credo of our youth. In
Doing Nothing—A History of Loafers,
Loungers, Slackers, and Bums in America,
Tom Lutz waxes poetic about the doing-nothing ethic of the 1960s cultural revolution.
²¹
He reminds us that we celebrated writers like Baba Ram Dass who told us that “striving, pushing, desperate grabbing at the brass ring—any and all ambitious desires—were worse than distractions; they were the very stuff that made nirvana impossible and were destroying the planet. One had to let go, drop out, be free.” Baba Ram Dass sums it all up with this: “Now is now. Are you going to be here or not?”
²²
That’s the very question we need to ask ourselves the next time we hear our cell phone ping!

Chapter Four
THE STARGAZERS: Addicted to Celebrity

I
am standing inside Madison Square Garden, one of the high citadels of celebrity worship. This is where pop superstars come to receive the genuflecting adoration of their swooning fans. I am here to bear witness to the newest goddess of the cybergeneration. Emerging from the darkness in a cloud of white smoke, Lady Gaga easily takes possession of the tens of thousands of us packed together in front of the stage. She orders us to drop the glowing cell phones we’re all pointing at her to take pictures. Instead, she demands we wave our arms and scream out our love for her. “You should cheer from start to finish,” she shouts! We obey giddily. We have surrendered to her and become her “little monsters.” In between her explosively choreographed renditions of “Poker Face,” “Bad Romance,” and “Just Dance,” Madonna’s heir apparent switches from one extraordinarily ornate outfit to another. My favorite was a glittery one-piece swimsuit that shot long flames out of her breasts and crotch.

Lady Gaga also sprinkles in little speeches. “Tonight is proof to all of you that you can be whoever you want to be! [cheers] Because I used to be standing right there, where you are, looking up at some BITCH on the stage that I wanted to be!” To that, the sold-out crowd erupts as one in a monstrous roar, affirming her theatrically expressed thesis.

No wonder her album/tour is entitled
The Fame Monster
and one of her hits is “Paparazzi.” Lady Gaga gets fame! She has just neatly summed up one key motive behind our collective addiction to celebrity.

We All Want to Be Stars

As if to confirm that Gaga has correctly psychoanalyzed the crowd, everywhere I look the stands are filled with mini-Gagas, young women—and some young men—wearing strange things on their heads and painting their faces with extreme makeup, trying hard to look and act as avant-garde as their idol.

Lady Gaga is up on that stage precisely because she thought up all that wild stuff—the outrageously deformed musical instruments, the fire-shooting outfits, the concept of clothing as movable sculpture, the playing of the piano with her feet and even her behind. Not to mention that it’s hard to get her
rah, rah, ump pa pa
dance tunes out of your head. She may have borrowed some inspiration from other stars, including Madonna, Elton John, and David Bowie. But Lady Gaga is clearly an original.

“The ingredients (for fame) are the indescribable and the special. People love authenticity and people love something that feels fresh.”

—Perez Hilton, celebrity blogger

When We See the Real Deal, We Know It

Originality is what makes a genuine star: inventing something new, combined with uncommon talent and having the guts to lay it all out there and act like you don’t care if the world agrees. And sometimes the world doesn’t agree. Not long after I attended her concert, I was one of many revolted by the now-infamous dress Lady Gaga wore to an awards show that was made of raw meat from a slaughtered animal. Determined to perpetually trump herself, she crossed the line into obscene cruelty. But the really scary part is that someone with Lady Gaga’s enormous influence can inspire callousness in her fans, who want to be just like her. Many girls imitated her meat dress on Halloween.
¹

We Live Through Our Shining Star

The celebrity with whom we identify becomes our avatar in the rarified world occupied by the famous, allowing us to vicariously navigate it. We want to be that living, breathing model of success and drink in the adulation. Our imaginations exploit it to the max. In our subconscious there’s a moment where we merge. That experience of feeling like the star ourselves causes a pleasure rush. Suddenly, the wiring gets crossed and—for a moment—we’re supercharged.
We
are on stage,
we’re
getting the wild applause,
we’re
swamped by the paparazzi, and
we
are hustled along the red carpet past the nameless, faceless people whose pathetic club we desperately seek to escape. That’s the addictive hit!

Admiring a genuine star like Lady Gaga, who comes along once in a blue moon, is one thing. But America is in the throes of a populist plague that has manifested itself in a feverish obsession with “celebrities” of all sizes, shades, and stripes, regardless of talent or originality. The explosion of media outlets—hundreds of cable channels, millions of websites—has created a plethora of platforms that people mount in order to declare their celebrity status. And the public co-signs it.

“The concept of being a celebrity has been cheapened. There are many more paths to celebrity than ever before. In the old days, you used to have a music career, or be on a TV show, and that has changed. Now you can get there through winning a reality show or being an online celebrity.”

—Howard Bragman, publicist and
author of
Where’s My Fifteen Minutes?

Our Disposable Culture Has
Created Disposable Celebrities

We don’t fix appliances anymore. We throw them out and get new ones. The same holds true for our celebrities. We’re churning out disposable plasti-fame that’s cheapening our culture. Reality TV is Exhibit A, granting attractive, quirky, hot-tempered, or even unstable people stardom for simply showing up on TV as themselves, with some careful behind-the-scenes glamorizing and staging of course.
The Real Housewives
phenomenon has become an instant-celebrity factory. For every genuine star produced by
American Idol,
we create a subset of mocked pseudostars whose primary purpose seems to be to get their names on everyone’s lips even at the price of intense humiliation. Whatever did happen to Sanjaya Malakar, one of the finalists on
Idol’s
Season 6, whose excruciating performances and wild hairdos created a firestorm of debate? Incensed that Sanjaya had not been eliminated, one female viewer went on camera and announced, “As a result of this I am going on a hunger strike. I am doing this because I believe that other talented contestants, who deserve a chance to win, are being eliminated because there are other people that think it would be funny to try and sabotage
American Idol
by voting for a lesser contestant.”
²
Her hunger-strike announcement garnered hundreds of thousands of hits on YouTube.

Gandhi went on hunger strikes to protest British rule in India. Suffragettes endured hunger strikes in their fight for women’s right to vote. And, in early twenty-first-century America, we have devolved to holding a hunger strike to protest a contestant on
American
Idol
. Don’t get me wrong. I am not humorless. I do find
Jersey
Shore
’s Snooki and The Situation good for a chuckle. But where is our addiction to junk celebrity leading us as a culture?

It’s leading us to what I call the Tila Tequila syndrome. Now you don’t even need to audition for
American Idol
to become a celebrity. All you need to do is become a Twitter addict like Tila Tequila, whose incessant tweeting and wildly provocative, hypersexualized self-promotion garnered her millions of followers, crowned her the person with the most “friends” on MySpace.com in 2006, and landed her as number eight on
Forbes
’s Web Celeb 25 list, which purports to track “the biggest and brightest stars on the Internet, the people who have turned their passions into new media empires.”
³
Her “empire building” included hosting a TV show where contestants stripped, hosting a bisexual reality dating show, writing a self-help book, producing songs and videos like “I Fucked the DJ” and “I Love U,” where the phrase “I love you” is repeated over and over again to images of a very sexy Tila wielding a riding crop.
⁴
She also won Spike TV’s annual Guys’ Choice Award for “So Hot They’re Famous” as well as Bravo’s A-List Award for “A-List Drama Queen.”
⁵

You’ve got to hand it to Tila, considering she came out of nowhere in 2002 after being named Playboy.com’s “Cyber Girl of the Week.”
⁶
Her newest of many websites, TilasHotSpotDating.com, promises to be “the SICKEST dating site in the world.” Tila calls her fans her “Tila Army Soldiers.” It’s an all-volunteer army comprised of celebrity addicts jonesing for a cheap fix from a super-hot, slightly demented genius for self-glorification. I actually have a perverse admiration for Tila and her ability to pull herself up by her G-string. It’s her fans that I wonder and worry about. Why are so many people getting drunk on Tila Tequila?

The more available an addictive substance becomes, the easier it is to get hooked. As fast-food outlets and drive-thrus became ubiquitous, the number of food addicts skyrocketed in the United States. As prescription medications pervaded the culture, the number of pill heads soared. Similarly, as “celebrities” proliferate, accessible to us anytime via television or the Internet, the number of Americans obsessed with them is snowballing.

Out of the Mouths of Babes

Americans are getting hooked on celebrity at an ever-younger age. A perfect example is played out on YouTube as a three-year-old girl, Cody, has an emotional meltdown over teen heartthrob Justin Bieber. Her mom videotapes the scene.