All of this leads to a phenomenon that’s sometimes known as the ‘Paris Hilton effect’. Because we’re wired to direct our attention towards the people who are already the subject of attention, we’ll sometimes be drawn to people in the media without really knowing why. But our being drawn to them makes the media focus on them even more. We then attend to them more, then the media attends to them more, and then there’s a runaway effect, a feedback loop, in which the status of an essentially nondescript person becomes madly amplified.
