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Dan Olds from Beaverton, Oregon characterized those of us who are interested in popular culture as “slack-jawed yokels”  in a recent interview with .

Olds’ characterization was based on the fact that, in 2010, seven of the top 10 searches on Yahoo! were about celebrities:
Mr. Olds concluded that the Internet is not a serious tool for information dissemination because this did not include searches about the global economic crisis, the earthquake in Haiti, or the mid-term elections in the U.S.

Could it be that us yokels simply get our “hard news” by going directly to sites that specialize in this information (e.g. CNN, The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, The Economist, etc.?) rather than using search engines to find it?

The phenomenon of celebrity has been shown by Professor Graeme Turner, director of the at the University of Queensland, to perform important social functions:

• in the formation of cultural identity,
• as a mode of discourse that results in pleasurable social exchange, and
• in the construction of community.

, director general of the explains “…that the role celebrities play in people’s lives goes beyond a voyeuristic form of entertainment, but actually fulfills an extremely important research and development function for them as individuals and for society at large. People use celebrities as role models and guides.”

In the medical realm, , professor of medicine and public health at Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons, has shown how celebrities have influenced public attitudes toward diseases and their treatments. By analyzing between 1938 and 1992, he discovered how celebrity cases can educate the public, create advocates for research and patient care on behalf of other people with the same disease, and have even influenced aspects of the professional training of physicians.

An intriguing aspect of Dr. Lerner’s work is the important observation that the public increased their knowledge of medical topics and conditions, not because they were seeking health information but rather as a consequence of their primary interest in celebrities’ lives.

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