Social Media Didn’t Kill the Movie Star. It Cheapened the Pedestal.
I haven’t watched Kjersti Flaa’s new documentary, Social Media Killed the Movie Star, on Amazon yet. I intend to. But while listening to her the other day, talk about the premise behind it, something she said stayed with me. She spoke about how social media may have killed the Hollywood superstar because it took away the mystery and allure that stars once possessed.
I understand the argument. There was a time when movie stars existed at a distance from us. We saw them twenty feet tall on a cinema screen, beautifully photographed in magazines or arriving at premieres beneath flashing cameras. What we knew about them was carefully curated. Their private lives existed mostly behind closed doors, and whatever slipped through was delivered sanitized or amplified through publicists, journalists and gossip columns.
Distance created mystery, and mystery created mythology.
Social media certainly tore through that curtain. It is difficult to remain an ethereal Hollywood goddess when millions of people have watched you make scrambled eggs in your pajamas, complain about an airline losing your suitcase and sell collagen powder from your bathroom before breakfast.
But as I listened to the argument, another thought kept tugging at me.
What if social media didn’t kill the movie star simply because we learned too much about celebrities?
What if it killed the idea that becoming one was unattainable?
For most of Hollywood history, fame belonged to a very small and carefully controlled world. Studios, television networks, record labels, casting directors, magazine editors and powerful people sitting behind very large desks decided who would be seen. Someone had to open the gate.
Celebrity was something bestowed upon a chosen few. We watched them. We admired them. We envied them. Sometimes we worshipped them. Then someone put a camera inside a telephone, handed one to practically everyone and eventually introduced us to an algorithm.
Suddenly, the gate was no longer the only way in.
A woman doing makeup tutorials from her bedroom could reach millions of people. A teenager making videos in his kitchen could acquire an audience larger than some television programs. Someone completely unknown on Monday could post something on Tuesday and discover by Friday that millions of strangers knew their face.
With the right algorithm, almost anyone can become a celebrity. - Paty C.
And I think that changed something psychologically much bigger than our access to famous people.
We didn’t simply gain access to celebrities. We discovered that celebrity itself might be accessible. The person on the screen no longer necessarily belongs to some unreachable universe. ...She has a phone... I have a phone.... She has a kitchen. I have a kitchen. She uploaded a video.... I can upload a video.
Suddenly, the pedestal has stairs. But that realization led me to a much more uncomfortable question. Why was there a pedestal in the first place? Human beings have been elevating other human beings for as long as we have been recording our stories. Kings. Queens. Warriors. Religious figures. Aristocrats. Artists. Movie stars. Rock stars. Athletes. Influencers.
The costumes change.
The pedestal remains.
Perhaps we place people above us because they become containers for things we desire. Beauty. Wealth. freedom. Power. Talent. Recognition. Confidence. Sexuality. Belonging. We project pieces of our unlived lives onto people we have never met and then stare upward at the image we helped create.
Hollywood understood this remarkably well.
The old star system did not merely create actors. It manufactured mythology.
A relatively small group of people could be photographed, styled, promoted, interviewed and transformed into cultural objects of fascination. Their faces could sell movie tickets, magazines, clothes, perfume, cigarettes, cosmetics and dreams.
The celebrity was being exploited, certainly. But so was our fascination with the celebrity. Then social media arrived, and I wonder whether the machinery discovered something extraordinary. It didn’t need only a handful of people standing on pedestals anymore. It could give all of us one. Or perhaps, more accurately, it could give all of us the possibility of one.
Post the photograph. Make the video. Tell the story. Check the likes. Watch the views. Read the comments. Try again. Maybe this one will take off. Maybe this one will travel. Maybe the algorithm will notice me. Maybe everyone will notice me. That possibility may be far more powerful than celebrity itself.
Because now we are not simply consuming the spectacle. We are auditioning for it.
And this is where social media becomes far more interesting to me than a story about Hollywood losing its movie stars. Old Hollywood needed stars to entertain the public. Social media discovered that the public could entertain itself. We willingly provide the photographs, videos, opinions, arguments, jokes, dances, recipes, outrage, confessions, relationships, heartbreaks and intimate fragments of our lives that give everyone else something to watch.
We wake up and create content. Then we consume the content everyone else created. Then we react to their content, creating more content. And somewhere inside that enormous loop, attention becomes money. Most of us are never paid for producing the raw material that keeps this enormous cultural machine moving. We simply receive another currency.
Likes. Views. Followers. Comments. Little numerical confirmations that somebody saw us. And perhaps that is where the old Hollywood system and the new algorithmic system differ most dramatically. Hollywood exploited our fascination with a relatively small number of people. The algorithm discovered how to monetize our fascination with one another. And perhaps even more powerfully, our fascination with ourselves.
There is something almost ingenious about it. The pedestal became a slot machine.
Every time we post, there is a tiny possibility that this photograph, this thought, this video, this moment could be the one that catches fire.
Most won't.
But a casino doesn't need everyone to win. It only needs enough people to see someone winning. One ordinary person becomes extraordinarily visible, and millions of other ordinary people are reminded that visibility might happen to them too. So perhaps social media didn’t democratize celebrity.
Perhaps it democratized the audition for celebrity. And somewhere along the way, the traditional gatekeeper was partially replaced by something even more mysterious.
The algorithm.
At least with the old Hollywood system, we knew there was a casting director behind the door. Today we perform for something we cannot see and barely understand. We experiment with posting times, captions, hashtags, hooks, trending sounds and video lengths, trying to please an invisible system whose approval is measured in reach. The studio executive once decided who deserved an audience. Now a mathematical system can help decide who receives one.
And there is a delicious irony in that.
We are taring down the Hollywood gatekeepers because technology promised to democratize expression, only to find ourselves attempting to satisfy a gatekeeper made of code. Yet I don't think the algorithm itself is the villain. An algorithm has no secret desire to make someone famous or insignificant. It is a system responding to objectives and incentives. The more revealing question is what those systems have been designed to reward.
Attention. Because attention has become extraordinarily valuable.
Platforms want our attention. Advertisers want our attention. Influencers want our attention. Politicians want our attention. Brands want our attention. News organizations want our attention. And increasingly, we want one another's attention. Everyone is reaching into the same finite human day asking for a few more seconds.
Look at me. Listen to me. Buy from me. Agree with me. Be outraged with me. Follow me. Validate me.
And perhaps that is why I am less interested in whether social media killed the Hollywood superstar than in what happened to us after the superstar supposedly died. Because we did not stop creating idols. We simply began manufacturing them faster.
An influencer can begin as the antidote to celebrity. She feels ordinary. Accessible. Authentic. She talks to us from her bedroom. She answers comments. She shops where we shop. She struggles with the things we struggle with. We like her precisely because she does not appear to be standing on a pedestal.
Then millions follow her. Money arrives. Brands arrive. Assistants arrive. Houses get bigger. Vacations become more extravagant. Access becomes more limited. And slowly, almost imperceptibly, we rebuild beneath her the very pedestal we supposedly tore down. Which makes me wonder whether Hollywood was ever the real architect of celebrity at all.
Maybe we were.
Hollywood simply learned how to monetize something human beings were already inclined to do.
We choose people. We elevate them. We project onto them. We imitate them. We defend them. We envy them. Sometimes we tear them down, perhaps because watching someone fall from a pedestal can be almost as intoxicating as watching them climb onto one.
And now technology has industrialized the entire process. The most unsettling possibility is that the machinery no longer requires a small group of stars to exploit our longing for aspiration, belonging and recognition. It can recruit all of us. We are the audience. We are the performers. We are the consumers. We are the product. We are the fans.
And every once in a while, one of us becomes the star. Perhaps that is the real revolution social media created. It did not simply pull celebrities down from the heavens and reveal that they were ordinary human beings.
It handed ordinary human beings a camera, pointed toward an empty pedestal and whispered, “That could be you.”
And millions of us began auditioning.
So maybe social media didn’t kill the movie star. Maybe it did something far more profound. It exposed the pedestal. And, in my humble opinion, in exposing it, it also cheapened it. It showed me that there was never anything inherently sacred about the person standing upon it. The pedestal was built from attention, projection, money, mythology and our collective agreement to keep looking upward.
And if an algorithm can place an unknown person there tomorrow, perhaps the question is no longer who deserves to stand on it. Perhaps the question we should have been asking all along is why we are so desperate to stand on it ourselves.
To be seen. To be followed. To be wanted. To turn attention into currency.
And somewhere in that exchange, the distinction becomes increasingly difficult to see. Are we exploiting the attention of those looking up at us? Or are we being exploited by the machine that convinced us the pedestal was worth climbing in the first place?
Perhaps both.
And maybe that is the algorithm’s greatest trick. It didn’t simply teach us how to consume the celebrity.
It taught us to dream of becoming the product ourselves.
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