Filed by Bil at 1:25 am under Pop Culture, The Media

According to Yahoo! the ten most searched items of 2008 are as follows:

1. Britney Spears
2. WWE
3. Barack Obama
4. Miley Cyrus
5. RuneScape
6. Jessica Alba
7. Naruto
8. Lindsay Lohan
9. Angelina Jolie
10. American Idol

In case you don’t know what any of these are, I’ve linked to their respective Wikipedia articles. (I had to look up RuneScape.)

Two things stood out to me about this list: first, how is it possible that boysenberries didn’t make the list? I feel like I’m always looking up stuff about boysenberries. Secondly, how is Britney Spears still more famous than Barack Obama?

I was more disturbed than I should have been about the second part of that; I thought, what does this say about our society that Britney Spears is the most researched person/place/thing this year? And how am I so clueless? I mean, aside from NOTHING, what has she even done this year?

So I did my own Britney research. I searched for Britney Spears on the Yahoo! search engine. (Apparently, she has two official websites. That’s how famous she is.) I didn’t actually find anything interesting, but what I did learn was that yes, in fact, she did put out an album this year. I don’t know what the album is called – my research stopped shortly after it began – and I can’t tell you what a single song off that album sounds like. I don’t know if it’s a departure in a Bjorkish new artistic direction, incorporating musical instruments she learned to play while on a spiritual journey through Thailand, or if it’s a return to her Mouse Club Louisiana roots, or if it’s just more of the studio-doctored bubble gum we’ve had since the late nineties. I don’t know what the album cover art looks like. I don’t even know if she looks good or not. But I did read that she put out an album sometime in 2008. Is that what generated the searches? Not likely.

My theory was the train-wreck effect. It’s a marvelous escape – it’s horrible, and yet you cannot look away. And Britney is expendable. Not to diss, but she’s just a pop star. If she actually did take such a dive that she could no longer be in the spotlight, we might (gasp!) pay more attention to world leaders and Pulitzer Prize winners. Besides, we have plenty of other pop stars to live dangerously vicariously through. But Britney Spears is such an easy target. It’s like a blissful, gigantic machine crashing at full speed into another gigantic machine right on your front lawn.

But that theory of mine was based on assumptions, so I was forced to ignore it. How do I know why people are searching for Britney Spears? Furthermore, who the hell even came up with this list? Yahoo.com? It’s their own list of searches on their search engine. A list of Yahoo.com’s top-searched ANYTHING is limited to those users who search on Yahoo.com instead of another search engine, and the nation is not comprised only of Yahoo.com-users. Maybe more people searched for boysenberries on Google. I don’t know.

I don’t think it matters, really. She won’t be in the history books a hundred years from now. Musicians will not thank her for her groundbreaking contributions to popular music. MTV (if it still exists) will not thank her for her trailblazing forays into popular insanity. But children will learn about Barack Obama in grade school.

And how am I so assured of Britney’s absence from world memory in the future? Check it out. Yahoo! also came out with another list: the top ten most-searched influential women.

1. Angelina Jolie
2. Sarah Palin
3. Oprah Winfrey
4. Hillary Clinton
5. Gina Carano
6. Tina Fey
7. Michelle Obama
8. Katie Couric
9. Barbara Walters
10. Dara Torres

Judging by her absence from this list, it appears Yahoo.com does not consider Britney Spears influential. And if Yahoo.com doesn’t think you’re influential…then you must not be influential.

I used to wonder what it said about the national zeitgeist that Britney Spears trumps Barack Obama in searches. But this list is not indicative of us as a people or our attitude or whatever. Now I just wonder what it says about Yahoo.com that more people use that search engine to find out the latest on a particular train wreck of a pop star than the potential first black president.

And I wonder what it says about me that I look at these Yahoo.com top-ten lists. Probably nothing good.