Is Our Addiction to Internet Fame a Cry to God?”

Brittany Talissa King
9 min readMar 14, 2023

We’ve heard the saying — “The grass is always greener on the other side.”

It’s often a benign line from our favorite rom-coms, or 90’s sitcom. But this quote actually derived from a first century poet, Ovid, who once said, “The harvest is always richer in another man’s field.” In other words, the strive to attain what we believe we’re missing is literally millennia old. But here’s the thing, research has proved that acquiring “greener grass” not only doesn’t suffice our voids, or isn’t as enjoyable as we envisioned, but actually creates more desolation for ourselves.

And we’re seeing it more profoundly in our Digital Era. Let’s face it, things have become a bit out of control. Before the big bang of social media, there used to be a high barricade around the “traditional fame.” In order to attain it, one had very few ways to go about it. One could become an actor like Denzel, a singer like Britney, a professional athlete like Kobe, a supermodel like Tyra, or do something novel like Walk on the Moon. But since the overtaking of YouTube, Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, and Twitter — fame is now more accessible to the general public. The monopoly of celebrity is no longer owned by Hollywood. There’s 24-hour access to consume famous stars’ seemingly glamorous lives by scrolling our thumbs.

--

--

Brittany Talissa King

Writer/Journalist. I explore race relations, social issues, & social media through history and pop-culture. IG: @b.talissa X: @KingTalissa, Journalism MA — NYU.