Beauty pulpit for showbiz celebrities

With all due respect to her beauty, I visited Fan Bingbing's micro blog and found that the site was nothing more than a tiny package wrapped around herself: her moods, photos, social activities and such trivia, lackluster, devoid of any meaning in my opinion. I do not understand why fans flock to blogs like hers.

The celebrity domination in Web 2.0, however, is a worldwide problem. In 2013, seven of the top 10 most followed twitter users were celebrities in the show business: Katy Perry, Justin Bieber, Lady Gaga, Taylor Swift, Britney Spears, Rihanna and Justin Timberlake. You would have thought that people watch such people on TV, while the cyberspace is more of a marketplace for ideas. Instead, you see that a majority of users aren't all that excited about having the best ideas win. Most people pay attention to things that are skin deep, such as beauty.

I shouldn't have been frustrated with this, but I see that children are engulfed in the celebrity culture as well. I fear that we as parents are losing them to these thoughtless drifts in cyberspace. How can salt-and-pepper-haired dads compete with the one-and-only Rihannas and Bingbings of the world? We don't stand a chance.

No, I refuse to say this has anything to do with ego. I am bothered more by a deeper question: Exactly how broken is the reality we live in that things around us no longer satisfy, that people have to escape into irrelevant worlds around celebrities who are far away and incapable of making minds any sharper, or lives any better?

I often go to parks, lakes and other places where I expect to see more families with their children walking, playing or reading. Most of the time, I am the only one walking despite the gorgeous sunshine and blue sky that I could share. Perhaps that would answer my question.

The author is a US-based instructional designer, literary translator and columnist writing on cross-cultural issues.