Celebrity Gossip - Chelsea Strapp

Gossip has been around forever. Thanks to the internet, gossiping has been made even more effortless and universal. Many people around the world are able to follow and even contribute to gossip blogs at any given day. Celebrity gossip blogs seem to be especially intriguing to people around the world because the topics revolve around someone famous that everybody is familiar with. Gossip blogs are certainly addictive, but the malicious, evil posts are sending the wrong types of messages to their readers. Sure celebrity gossip blogs are entertaining, fascinating and basically just a bunch of fun, but is that fact alone enough to cover up all the cruel posts and negative behavior found on every page?

The trashy rumors and scandals found on celebrity gossip blogs are completely glamorized. It’s not only the glamorization of the bad behavior surrounding celebrities sending negative messages to the readers of these blogs; it’s also the abundance of the bad behavior. These types of blogs show nothing but bad behavior! The blogs literally show so many screw ups and so much bad behavior, it’s hard to believe there is anything else going on out there. Celebrity gossip blogs are ultimately a place that a young girl can go to catch up on the life of her favorite celebrity or even role model and find a summary of that same celebrity’s scandalous behavior.

The most compelling part of celebrity gossip blogs is the “bitch persona” which the writer inevitably takes on. Every celebrity has had a condescending post about them on some gossip blog. The “bitch persona” which unavoidably can be found on any gossip blogs also shows readers a negative message. The posts on these gossip blogs lead addicted readers to believe that disdainful language is acceptable.

A good example of the perfected “bitch persona” is the self-proclaimed Queen of All Media, Perez Hilton. So many celebrities have become the victim of Hilton’s spiteful remarks. One of Hilton’s favorite targets seems to be Miley Cyrus, the stare of The Disney Channel’s Hannah Montana. From referring to Cyrus as “Slutty Cyrus” to placing bets on whether or not the currently 17 year old Cyrus’s boyfriend would “knock her up before she turns 18”, Cyrus has certainly been the center of a lot of nasty remarks. And what exactly are these remarks showing these blogs’ readers? They’re saying that it is perfectly fine to talk trash about people. Who care’s about other people’s feelings, right? Why not just be wicked like the gossip blog authors?

There are many negative effects of gossip blogs, but the most drastic so far comes from a young girl at a private school in Australia. According to Sophie Elsworth’s article “Teen Pawns in Ugly Game of Cyber Scorn – Net Bully Taps Private Schools for Scandal in Youth Gossip Blog”, the elementary school aged student has “taken cyber bulling to new heights with a website that is terrorizing students”. This young girl literally started her own gossip blog. Instead of gossiping about well known celebrities, the gossip on this blog revolved around this girl’s own peers. Elsworth goes on to explain what the gossip entails. The girl posts details regarding her classmate’s “sexual orientation, drug problems, love lives and health woes”. This makes clear that celebrity gossip sites attract users of many different ages, and there are definitely resulting consequences. Grade school gossip has transitioned from writing on the walls of the bathroom stalls and can now be found on the internet for the whole world to see.

Celebrity gossip blogs are popular. Since so many people read these blogs, there is a large number of people who are influenced by them. Celebrity gossip blogs are very easy to find and are regularly viewed by many different people around the world. There are many negative effects of both reading celebrity gossip blogs as well as being the subject of these blogs. The writers of these celebrity gossip blogs often show no compassion for the celebrities which they are spreading rumors about. Not only are the frequent readers of these blogs susceptible to the bad behavior of the celebrities which they are researching, these readers also learn to have no concern for people’s feelings as they go on to gossip about the people in their own lives, as they inevitably will do. It’s obvious that celebrity gossip blogs are addictive, but that might not be such a good thing.