Hi everyone! My name is Emily and I am from Tenafly, New Jersey. Tenafly does not smell bad, just as most other parts of New Jersey do not smell bad. Anyway, I am a sophomore majoring in communication, and I am quite excited about this blogging business. The entertainment and fashion industries are serious interests of mine, and for that reason I have interned in fashion for the past three summers. On that note, the internet-related phenomenon that I’ve chosen to discuss is the fashion and entertainment news blog trend.
Blogging is a relatively new mode of expression, and in the last few years the fashion and entertainment news blog genre has really taken off. PerezHilton.com, Jezebel.com, Fashionista.com, and TheSartorialist.com are just a few prominent sites of this type. No matter what you’re looking for, these pop-culture obsessed bloggers are ready to fuel their pop-culture obsessed readers with the latest paparazzi snapshots, fashion trends, celebrity gossip, and style tidbits. With every star that develops an eating disorder, gets charged with a DUI, becomes hospitalized for “exhaustion”, or accidentally(?) overdoses on painkillers, bloggers stand by, ready to electronically jot down the details for the masses to consume. Thank you, Lindsay Lohan.
As interesting and hilarious as I find some of these celebrity and fashion forums can be, I also can’t help but wonder: when did these people become experts of celebrity psychology? Who died and made them Kings and Queens of the Popular Culture Universe? For instance, blogger Perez Hilton (a pseudonym for Mario Lavandeira) has experienced considerable fame in the last year or so. Hilton’s site gets so many hits a day that his name has transcended the internet blogosphere. Media outlets like television and magazines talk to him and talk about him, causing the face of this asynchronous discussion forum (Perez encourages his readers to provide comments and feedback) to become a ubiquitous part of the world he loves to hate. Perez Hilton has caused me to seriously doubt this generation’s ability to ever understand the idea of overexposure.
As Robin Givhan, The Washington Post’s Pulitzer Prize winning writer, points out in the latest issue of Harper’s Bazaar, when one enters “fashion blog” into the Google search engine, a staggering 135,000,000 results appear. It seems pretty clear that these sites (whose powers of diversion hover around the Facebook level) aren’t going anywhere… yet.
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