It's as inevitable as the periodic explosion of news surrounding a sensational court case or celebrity scandal: the clucking opprobrium from those consumers of more serious, real news, the admonishments to pay attention to the real news, the lamenting of the fallen state of our journalism. Of course, most of the people issuing these reproaches, if you can bait them into discussion, reveal themselves to be very well-informed on whatever issue they are telling you to ignore. Because those who consume and care about news can't help but soak up a little info when it is saturating the airwaves, and even if you ignore all the news it is hard to ignore the discussions that crop up among family, co-workers and friends. And sometimes, these stories can be so genuinely compelling we can't help ourselves.
And I say: don't feel guilty about streaming the Casey Anthony sentencing hearing, or reading long exposes on Tiger Woods' multiple mistresses, or bookmarking Perez Hilton and TMZ. Those these stories may seem frivolous, they are absolute essential to our ability to function as a cohesive society.
Human beings are by our nature a tribal animal. We are inclined to take care of our children first, then other members of our extended families, and then other members of our tribe. While there are always good Samaritans among us, and many people are inclined to show compassion toward and help those outside the tribe, it is a larger leap to care for those that we see as outside our circle, as having little in common with us.
There are many things that hold us together as Americans. There are founding values that we share; we have a language and a history. With some exception, we admire George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, and Martin Luther King; we like to have friends over on a summer day and drink beer and cook hamburgers on the grill.
But do we have a common culture, and if so, what is it? We have many cultural touchstones, with which everyone is familiar--Elvis, The Wizard of Oz, Nancy Drew, Aretha Franklin, Star Wars, Sesame Street. But are these enough to bind us together as a tribe?
Think about the way you build communities and teams, whether it be in a college dorm, a neighborhood, or a workplace. While our common knowledge and cultural mores help us to interact with one another, we build the relationships through talking about people, not talking about art and ideas.
We praise. We judge. We voice our concerns. We pass along gossip. And through all of these, we establish our most deeply held values, our opinions about how human beings should behave toward one another and conduct themselves on a daily basis.
We all know that gossip can be damaging if we are careless or cruel, but in the grand scheme of things, it is by paying attention to one another, reacting to behavior and passing along information that we make the glue that turn us from individuals who learned about the same founding fathers in high school to people who know, trust, and work with one another. It is the way we take more abstract discussions about our values and beliefs and turn them in concrete principles.
We crave celebrity and sensational stories, and the media happily provides them, because we as a species are programmed to be attentive to the personal behavior of others. And by learning about these stories and discussing them, we are able to maintain the grand illusion that we are all in fact part of the same small tribe--that we all know people in common, and are thus only one degree separated from one another.
We seek connection. It is common, when first meeting someone, to start seeking that connection, to find a person that we both know in common, a school we both attended, a place where we both lived. But failing that, I can always fall back on calling Charlie Sheen crazy or Tiger Woods a dog.
I can start up a discussion with someone on the MARTA train about Casey Anthony, and in so doing, we establish in a very personal, specific way our feelings about motherhood, truth, and justice. And voila--we are no longer random strangers, but are both people who 'know' this woman named Casey Anthony, and think she was a terrible mother. We are of the tribe, and now are more sympathetic to one another.
Of course, we need to pay attention to politics, to conflicts abroad, to the economy. But we don't need to do so in exclusion of Brangelina and the royal wedding. Those kind of stories have their own, very essential place.