You may not have thought about it this way yet but trust me; Goody is a phenomenon. A true world first for humanity. At no time in history has a life like hers been even remotely possible. We are living now in a world where a woman of no particular virtue and who has contributed nothing of any special worth to the human race has risen to a level of fame that was once reserved for the talented, the hardworking or at the very least the absurdly wealthy or privileged. She was born a nobody. She lived an unremarkable life for just over two decades. She applied for Big Brother 3 (2002 series). She became, overnight, a household name. But this in itself is nothing special. Not these days at least.
Jade was just one of a clutch of contestants to appear in Big Brother 3. She exists now among a sprawling number of "reality TV stars" who have appeared on various programs. A small number have gone on to live in the public eye to a greater or lesser extent. Jade, however, has gone on to live and will soon die, in the full glare of publicity. For those who don't know, Goody went on from Big Brother 3 to appear in Celebrity Big Brother (something about that is just so incestuous!) where she went from famous to infamous in a storm of race-shame, she had kids with another "reality TV star" and has, throughout, appeared in magazines, on TV shows and maintained a public profile out of all proportion with any personal richness she may or may not possess. And now, just shy of thirty years since her unregarded and inauspicious birth, she is about to die of cancer, tragically young and in terrible pain. Her wedding, a macabre fairy tale, has provided the final flourish.
What does it mean? How is Jade Goody a worthy topic for the student of the future? She represents the first of a new breed. A breed of public figure who live their lives in the media, who exist to be observed. She doesn't provide any great example nor does she invoke any great admiration. If anything she makes those who watch her feel superior! But she does provide something. What it is I don't know for certain but I can hazard a guess. We hear all the time of the atomized nature of human society in the modern, post-industrial, secular twenty-first century. We are disconnected, in so many ways, from those around us and any sense of true belonging. Through the likes of Goody we feel some kind of bond. She unites us and is, for better or worse, one of us. In a society where more and more people are choosing to reach out and broadcast their lives through Facebook, Twitter, Blogs and so on, there is clearly a very real need to be addressed.
We are at a point in human history where the issue of privacy is high on the public agenda. The ID Card scheme, DNA databases, CCTV, monitoring of emails and phone calls. We fear that our private lives are no longer private while at the same time we choose to make more and more of our lives public by our on volition. This apparent contradiction can be seen as a generational turning point. Very soon the first generation who have never known a world without the internet in almost every home and reality TV snooping in to the minutiae of 'normal' people's lives will come of age. They won't see the distinction between public and private in the same way as their parents. With technology embedded in everything we do becoming more hyper-connected every day and information sharing bringing about a new forms of consumerism and new ways of socializing the student of 2059 will see the early twenty-first century and the Jade Goody phenomenon as the moment when a new world was born.
So there you have the 'why?' of this blog. I'm writing here about a world that is changing in a very particular way. Just as the 9/11 attacks brought about a new era in international relations and the discovery of DNA changed the way we understood the nature of the natural world, the Jade Goody story is a bookmark in history. We will understand social anthropology as pre and post Goody. The irony of the medium should be obvious.
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