The HELLO! magazine syndrome

I wonder if we will ever come to a point when we will decide to reclaim our private moments and go back to the days when personal photos were only seen by immediate family and close friends rather the 200 Facebook “friends” on our profile.  

The way things are headed, Malta seems to be ripe for a Hello! type of magazine. The closest thing we have to it is a very, very pale imitation:  the TV guide magazine Gwida, which has for a while now been splashing photos of weddings and babies of local celebrities. 

It was through Gwida, in fact, that I learned that Eileen Montesin got married to her longtime companion. The fact that she was willing to share this very private moment on the front cover of a magazine to coincide with the launch of the new TV season is, of course, pure coincidence. For better or worse, she was not averse to promoting her return to television with the kind of gossipy marketing which is lapped up by the general public.  

And, inevitably, I know there will be those reading this who will be ready to tap, tap, tap their replies on their keyboards with an indignant huff: “so what, what’s wrong with it, doesn’t she have the right to celebrate her wedding and share it with her fans, who do you think you are, raining on her parade….?”

Yes, maybe they are right. Too often lately I have started to feel out of sync - the more people cheerfully broadcast every single nut and bolt of their personal lives purely for self-promotional purposes, the more I wonder why it leaves me with a niggling, uncomfortable feeling.

Through the media, I and the rest of the country also recently found out that PN MP Kirsty Debono is pregnant. I wracked my brains to understand how this could possibly be ‘news’ and why this should be any of my business. But when I pointed this out, there were those who came back with the usual mantra, “so what, at least it’s something positive for a change, what’s wrong with it, etc. etc.” 

The thing is I’m sure many other MPs became parents during successive administrations but I do not ever remember it ending up as a news item. What next?  “Check out MEP Miriam Dalli’s new hairstyle!” ?  These headlines are not only non-news but they also reduce our female politicians to about the same status as Kim Kardashian while reducing our media to frantic, paparazzi-style tabloids.

And that’s the crux of the matter, right there. We, with the rest of the Western world, have become besotted, entranced and absolutely engulfed by the idea of celebrity and fame just for fame’s sake.  So we gobble up every little thing there is to know about public figures, wanting to worm out every last detail of their lives in order to satiate our thirst for more and more information about them.

They, in return, feel pressure to share their lives with the media machine in order to remain “in the news”.

I think you would have had to be living under a rock not to know that the self-avowed perpetual bachelor George Clooney finally got married to Amal Alamuddin (or as one cleverly feminist article recently put it, “Internationally acclaimed barrister Amal Alamuddin marries actor”).

Meanwhile, Ashton Kutcher and Mila Kunis just had a baby and to satisfy the prying eyes of the media they were almost obliged to release the photos, although they did it in a very tongue-in-cheek way by publishing photos of various babies and asking the public to guess which one was theirs.

It has been clear for a while that Malta has “gone Hollywood” and is busy emulating all this behaviour. Even though it is on a much smaller scale this, paradoxically, makes the impact even more overwhelming. The private has become public and it seems that nothing is left unspoken, unsaid or unpublished online.

I know so, so much about the intimate lives of not only public figures but also ordinary people who are merely acquaintances and I wonder whether that is a good thing, or even really necessary.

A lot of it is due to Facebook, of course, where the very nature of the beast leads to this overwhelming, compelling desire (or should I say need?) to share and document everything that happens to us. No matter how much you may cherish your privacy and lack of desire to advertise your every move, the truth is that these days, no personal event is really safe as people immediately start clicking away with their smart phones, not caring so much about the wedding or party they are attending, but caring only to record that they were there, as their selfie (uploaded within seconds) will amply demonstrate. Who needs paparazzi?

I have come to realize that the “Like” button and all that it represents by way of public validation has a lot to answer for and explains this obsession with celebrity culture.

For if you think about it,  FB has made all of us into “celebrities”, at the centre of our own homemade movie with our Timeline documenting our every experience and every fleeting thought. Nothing brought this home more than the FB video which came out last year and which we were being urged to share on our timelines.

When I watched mine, I felt unnerved and decided not to share it. Despite the fact that I do not post many personal photos it felt weird to see various parts of my life grabbed and randomly selected like that by this arbitrary tool. It felt like an eerie invasion of privacy even though I had provided the information myself.   

I wonder if we will ever come to a point when we will decide to reclaim our private moments and go back to the days when personal photos were only seen by immediate family and close friends rather the 200 Facebook “friends” on our profile.  

Meanwhile for local celebrities who want to remain in the limelight, I suppose that it is only by sharing as much as possible that they can still retain a measure of recognition in this fleeting world of popularity. For if you are not being talked about, you might as well not exist.

The problem with the Hello! magazine syndrome, however, is that it is an insatiable monster which needs to be constantly fed. Once you have crossed the line and start stripping away at personal boundaries, the public feels they “own” you because you have exposed yourself so much to them.  

The question begs itself: where do you draw the line, where do you stop?