Getting back to Grant’s post, I’d be interested in measuring diversion, or the very least, debating how to measure diversion in this case. What percentage of news heard is celebrity related, vs current world events (in particular the war) and how did the war affect our desire for diversion?

I start my day with the NYT, WaPo, WSJ and FT. Then I drill down to read more narrowly-focused news that’s work-related. In fact, I spend much of my day reading about what’s going on in the world today and what’s likely to happen tomorrow.

And I rarely encounter anything about Paris Hilton unless I make a point to seek it out.

I rather enjoy celeb culture — celebs are a cheap thrill, especially when they crash and burn. And I know better than to take them seriously. Which is how I think most of us (teenage girls possibly excepted) feel.

Then again, I did read in today’s WSJ that fashion insiders regard the Swiss watch industry’s focus on celeb endorsements as an outdated marketing strategy. High-fashion is said to be moving away from being identified with celebs and back to using anonymous but beautiful models in their marketing.

So maybe celeb culture is now big enough to bifurcate. We civilians can’t get enough of Paris Hilton’s misdeeds and assorted antics while top-dollar goods and services realize that celeb culture is too tawdry for them to want to be associated with it.

Meaning that while celeb culture is likely a permanent feature of the pop culture landscape, it is still something that marketers can choose to use or not as they see fit.

However, I’m not sure that “A&F” SPECIFICALLY is spurring this possible watershed. As we become engulfed in celebreality and are exposed more and more to their “human” side, we’re naturally growing incurious.

As vignettes in People, celebs grow larger than life… but as they mesh into the scripting of reality TV in the same predictable way as Joe SixPack on Road Rules, they begin to lose their distance from the audience… which will start to become a huge PR blunder for many of these stars.

The notable exception that proves the rule: Jerry Springer on Dancing with the Stars… who was in dire need of a little normal-nice-guy-ocity…

My point: Celebs, don’t let Reality TV writers retool your mystique.

The cult of celebrity seems to me very similar to the cult of current affairs a few generations ago – everyone followed the news because it was a common touchpoint, a cultural phenomenon that everyone had in common, could talk about at dinner parties and about which opinions were considered matters of social and personal significance. Now the common phenomenon is celebrity – a sort of current affairs with more accessibility and human interest and good old voyeurism than geo-politics. But like the current affairs that defined newspapers, celebrity is a function of the media technology that is available. It is possible, via TV and magazines, for an audience of millions to follow the fortunes of a few hundred famous people. Yet the web makes it possible for an audience of a few hundred people to follow the fortunes of a few hundred other people, and for every person to make their own selection of who to watch rather than accept the choice imposed by the editor of Hello, Heat or National Inquirer.

The cult of celebrity is to a great extent a media phenomenon, and like so much of what we currently call media the atomisation that the web facilitates makes media – in terms of a collective experience – increasingly meaningless.

Already millions of teens spend more time watching the antics of people they know, or people who are really like them (as opposed to rich, famous people who are in that sense distinctively unlike them), on MySpace than they do watching what you or I would call the news, or even the celebrity news. Celebrities are lionised and scrutinised for their frailties more than their achievements; see for example millionaire rappers continuing to claim some tenuous connection to the street culture they grew up with even after they move to gated mansions in Beverley Hills; see the ongoing, palpably false, claim that David Beckham, worth £40 million a year, is somehow “working class” hero.

The cult of celebrity will die not merely because the culture becomes naturally fatigued but because the audience is looking for something with which to identify, and as the technology that allows us to watch our friends overtakes the technology that allows us to watch strangers made affluent by our scrutiny the cult of celebrity will be left behind.