Celebrity, Pandemic, and Domesticity

In Presumed Intimacy , sociologist Chris Rojek writes that media audiences may have “para‐social” relationships with two media apparitions: statistical people and celebrities. By “para‐social” he means emotional connections to remote persons far beyond our kith and kin (1–10). A big disaster intensifies such connections with statistical victims and with celebrities as audiences look for meaning, direction, and emotional outlet. As the novel coronavirus (COVID‐19) infects every population, statistical people—once media's remote victims of disaster—are now us, comprising nearly eight billion and summarized in escalating numbers of the infected, the surviving, and the dead. As the COVID‐19 pandemic unfolds, celebrities on social media have status as arbiters of this crisis, but an intensified domesticity has transformed their roles. In a disaster where massive numbers of people, worldwide, are forced to stay indoors, this display of domesticity is riveting. As people meet online, newly revealing their own domestic spaces for work and play, celebrities’ domestic spaces are screen openings among many such openings. As celebrities are seen going about their daily lives, they perform among many ordinary performances and in relation to them. The contrast of their strange lives to the ordinary could never be more pronounced.