Celebrities are Pawns

Lil Uzi Vert. Suede Brooks. Max Greenfield. Gigi Hadid. Jake Gyllenhaal. Do these names mean anything to you? These are all the celebrities I have seen in my first three months living in New York City.

On a slow Saturday morning, I walked into a tattoo shop with two of my friends since my roommate wanted to spontaneously get her third ear piercing. That is, this specific Saturday was slow, until Lil Uzi Vert turned around as my friend was talking to the piercer. We held in our squeals and excitement, put on our straightest faces, and acted like we were not standing in the same room as the rapper we had just seen in concert the prior weekend. I texted my parents “omg in a tattoo shop with lil uzi,” to which they responded, “Wish we knew who that was.” 

Fast forward a few weeks, I’m in a store on Broadway with two of my suitemates frantically searching for a last-minute Halloween costume. A girl who looks familiar overhears me and says, “Tinkerbell would be so cute!” When I made eye contact with her, I realized this was a girl I consistently see on my TikTok For You page, with over a million followers. I whispered her name, Suede Brooks, to my suitemates and they responded with blank faces. But then when I told a girl in my class I had seen her, she told me how jealous she was of me. Why is it that I felt like I was standing in the room with a celebrity, but my friends didn’t even recognize her fame? 

I’m a big time New Girl fan. On my walk to University Hall to visit my friends, we stopped at Sweetgreen to eat. As we unpacked our stress about our classes, I recognized someone who walked by. “Oh my gosh that’s Schmidt from New Girl.” One of my friends joined in on my excitement, while the other looked around at the many passersby, not knowing who we were talking about or having any idea who Max Greenfield was. 

As my friends and I are the same age, I find it inexplicable that we could have such subjective definitions of “celebrity.” With each of the celebrities I have seen since living in New York City, I have often wondered the same question: how do our demographics and social media algorithms shape our perceptions of “celebrity?”

When you search “celebrity” on Google, the definition provided by the Oxford English Dictionary is “a famous person,” and “the state of being well known.” However, in today’s world of mass media, being “well-known” can vary based on age, where you live, preferences, and the media presented to you based on the obscure data crunching that powers our favorite apps. 

When I think about the perception of celebrities, I first think about my parents, who fall into a different demographic than I do. My father is a 49-year-old man from New Jersey, who enjoys activities like fishing, playing golf, and (shockingly) watching TikToks. But weirdly enough, the name “Suede Brooks,” who has over a million followers, means nothing to him. Instead, people who post fishing videos and golf techniques are the people he would be excited to spot in the New York City streets – people who I couldn’t even try to name. 

People often talk about which “side” of TikTok they are on, meaning whether they see constant “Get Ready with Me” videos, or more niche videos. What they really are discussing, though, is how the algorithm shapes which types of videos appear on their For You page most often. In the New York Times article “How TikTok Reads Your Mind,” Ben Smith writes, “TikTok relies heavily on how much time you spend watching each video to steer you toward more videos that will keep you scrolling.” So, for my dad, watching more and more videos of fishing and golf (the content he likes) makes more of that kind of video show up in his feed, keeping micro-influencers like Suede Brooks, far, far away. In turn, his perception of “celebrity” completely varies from mine.

This doesn’t just go for my father and me. My roommates, two of whom are from Colombia, are also subject to completely different algorithms than I am. We often decompress at the end of the night, all hanging out in one room, just sitting together chatting and, often, watching TikTok. Their first language is Spanish. So when I peer over onto my roommates’ phones and see what they’re watching on TikTok, I am shocked to see verified users with millions of likes who I have never even heard of. But the content of the people they watch is in Spanish, which appears more on their recommendations since they continuously like videos that are in Spanish. 

The subjectivity of celebrities is an ever-growing phenomenon. As mass media disseminates in many different directions, so will the perception of celebrities. People in various countries deem people famous who Americans would not recognize if they were standing face to face. Even people who I would consider to be known-by-all, like Kim Kardashian, may not be differentiable from her also-famous sisters to someone like my grandfather, for example. 

All of this talk about celebrities and people we recognize executes exactly what algorithms are designed to do. By talking about people I see on the streets, the people who are famous in my terms versus someone else’s, I create buzz and interest. Does our consideration of who is a celebrity versus who is not even matter? Undoubtedly, no. 

So, really, what is a celebrity? Why do I spend so much of my time fascinating over certain people’s lives when other people don’t even know they exist? Why do I get excited to spot someone eating at a restaurant in New York, just living their life, while other people walk by and see the person just as another human eating a burger? As social media grows and algorithms become more strategic at presenting us with content that will keep us on our screens, there will never be a person who is completely well-known by all. Celebrities are tools media platforms use for economic gain, keeping us on the app just long enough to generate some revenue. 

If we spend less time focusing on people who do not know we exist, then we will finally begin to recognize that celebrities are simply pawns in the game of consumerist society– maybe that can become our definition of “celebrity.”