Perez Hilton/Mario Lavandeira, blogger: the meaning of his success.

Perez Hilton, whose real name is the less euphonious, Mario Lavandeira, is one of the world’s most successful “bloggers”. I use the quotation marks because what he puts on his blog does not compare to what most serious bloggers are trying to do. In brief, Perez Hilton blogs about the doings of the famous – and has an undying interest in the trivial. His blog consists of everything an intelligent person wouldn’t want to know, about people an intelligent person wouldn’t want to know in the first place.

It worried me to learn that Perez Hilton’s eponymous website secures around 100 million visitors per month. That is an astonishing number compared to the typical blog and is indicative, not of Perez Hilton’s greatness as a writer, but of his audience’s lack of discrimination. Now, I am not going to criticize his readership, for themselves, nor blame them as individuals for being interested in such classic items as: “Faeces throwing monkey” and “Soledad O’Brien: not as nice as she looks”. Other posts call Joaquin Phoenix’s rap debut, a “joke”, praise Whitney Houston’s good looks, and speculate that Courtney Love’s daughter Frances Bean (all of 16) has the hots for Robert Pattinson, of Twilight fame.

It all comes across as extremely unimportant, vapid, trivial and ultimately valueless. Yet, it sells. A hundred million people a month pop by to read what Perez Hilton considers important enough to highlight in Hollywood gossip. It is also making Mario Lavandeira a rich man: last year he earnt two million US dollars.

The big question is: why? Why do so many people actually waste precious time in their lives actually reading such material? The answer is that the culture in which they live has lost sight of what is important. They grow up surrounded by the trivial masquerading as important – and so lose the ability to distinguish what is worthy of attention, from what should be ignored. Everything Mario Lavandeira/Perez Hilton writes, should be ignored by anyone of any discernment – and probably is. However, there are millions of people who find the most minor deeds or misdeeds of “celebrities” fascinating enough to pop by for a daily read of “Perez Hilton, Queen of all Media”.

I am not sure whether this global fascination for the trivial is a temporary cultural issue, or whether it is indicative of a lasting decline in the mental powers of the human race. You see people who are thinking about whether Joaquin Phoenix really should shave, are people who are not thinking about anything more important. When you have a whole human race doing that, then matters are dire. From Perez Hilton’s traffic it would seem that a significant chunk of the human race are, in fact, preoccupied with matters as trivial as whether a particular 16 year old girl fancies Robert Pattinson, or not.

It is my hope that our present era of triviality will pass and usher in an era of more substance. However, the signs don’t look good. The celebrity culture has a great momentum about it. More and more media space is consumed with gossip on the most trivial of individuals. Then, on top of this, there is a generation on generation decline in the intellectual (genetic) quality of the human race as a whole, which is well documented and has been going on since at least the 19th century. (see Richard Lynn)

It looks like the future will be as the present, only worse – and the Perez Hilton’s of the world will find it as easy to make two million dollars a year, in the future, as they do, today.

Incidentally, Perez Hilton/Mario Lavandeira’s site was so busy it took me several minutes to load on both of the two occasions I have ever visited the site, in my life (both for research purposes, I hasten to add!). I found the whole experience rather uncomfortable and, had I not the need to come to understand the Perez Hilton/Mario Lavandeira phenomenon, I probably would not have bothered waiting.

The fact that Mario Lavandeira’s gossip can attract so many visitors leads me to ask one question: if Albert Einstein were alive today, and had a blog, would he attract 100 million visitors a month, even with his global fame?

I seriously doubt it. It is more likely that Einstein would attract a few hundred thousand interested souls lost in a dessert of others, consumed with whether a particular star brushes their teeth often enough.

We live in trivial times – fingers crossed for deeper ones, to come. A good sign would be if Perez Hilton’s site hit rate began to drop precipitously. Should it ever fall below a million a month, perhaps we could breathe more easily and look forward to more considered times ahead.

Here’s hoping.

(If you would like to learn more of Ainan Celeste Cawley, a scientific child prodigy, aged eight years and seven months, or his gifted brothers, Fintan, five years exactly, and Tiarnan, twenty-eight months, please go to: http://scientific-child-prodigy.blogspot.com/2006/10/scientific-child-prodigy-guide.html I also write of gifted education, IQ, intelligence, the Irish, the Malays, Singapore, College, University, Chemistry, Science, genetics, left-handedness, precocity, child prodigy, child genius, baby genius, adult genius, savant, wunderkind, wonderkind, genio, гений ребенок prodigy, genie, μεγαλοφυία θαύμα παιδιών, bambino, kind.

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