How collective Relations (Pr) Hype Can originate Celebrities?

Lately, I have been thinking about an spirited news item category. It all started, when few months ago approximately every mainstream daily newspaper in the Uk reported the sad demise of Jade Goody on the front page. While it really is a sad event, when I saw this news item grabbing 2 of the top 5 read news on Bbc website two things clicked in my mind with regard to celebrity hype and the Pr strategies and marketing.

Firstly, in Liverpool I had an academic colleague who researches into the area of celebrities and their impact on masses. He also happened to be a fanatic football fan and I remembered him telling me that he had read umpteen estimate of celebrity biographies (including many footballers and entertainers) and had accomplished that there was hardly anything spirited in those memoirs (Btw, jade goody had one!). It was just one skill which had put most of these habitancy in the mainstream media and once they are there we know the human struggle to be there.

Todays World News Headlines

The second belief which arrived in my mind related to the power of high tech communal relations (Pr). I might be completely wrong but even the Bbc obituary of Jade Goody notes "...she hit the headlines as a young woman with shockingly poor normal knowledge, who was often the object of her fellow housemates' derision" (Bbc, 2009). However, when you just type Jade Goody in Google it turns up with 5,130,000 results. These comprise a Wikipedia which is any print pages long, legal website, news (obviously in terms of celebrity gossip), a perfume website and a Fan website (yes...)!

Thinking about this I ran someone else Google search for Prof. Amartya Sen (yes, yes, the 1998 Nobel prize winner) and it returned with 659,000 entries. Pardon me Prof. Sen for even comparing.

However, this demonstrates the power of communal relations and how Pr firms exploit it.

I am amazed to see that society as a whole what do we really look for and how our thoughts can be manipulated. Reminds me of Edward Bernays - the father of communal relations and the nephew of Sigmund Freud - who believed in manipulating society and resultant communal opinion. In one of his seminal works 'the propaganda' he argued that the manipulation of communal belief was a important part of democracy. He successfully used it in 'breaking the taboo against woman smoking in public' and even helping United Fruit enterprise (today's Chiquita Brands International) and the U.S. Government to facilitate the successful overthrow of the democratically elected president of Guatemala, Jacobo Arbenz Guzman.

Today's high tech communal relations firms have honed their skills with such a finesse that a 'Miss Piggy' who reportedly belief a ferret was a bird, an abscess a green drink from France, that Pistachio painted the Mona Lisa, that there was a part of England called East Angular and that there was a language called Portuganese (Jeffries, 2009) gets 2 out of 5 top news items on Bbc and gets coverage on all the world media. I have hardly ever seen that being achieved...

Something has really going wrong at the macro societal level or I guess Bernays was so right when he said "The communal has its own standards and demands and habits. You may modify them but you dare not run counter to them." This is what we question as news today, don't we?

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Power of communal relations

How collective Relations (Pr) Hype Can originate Celebrities?

Thanks To : todays world news headlines