It’s no secret that our parasocial relationship with celebrities has become increasingly intrusive. Social media fuels a feeling that we can, and should, know everything about them, from their morning routines and favourite songs to traumatic childhoods and breakups. Society is steadily locking public figures into an invasive social contract with fans from which there are few signs of them being released.

But the recent death of Liam Payne has brought this desire to know into a new light. Our entitlement to celebrities posting, performing and publicly displaying their lives evidently translates into a horrific obsession with the details of their death. We display an inability to resist raking over their past, and an obsession with our own grief for a person we did not actually know, however much we try to convince ourselves otherwise.

Flicking on the radio the morning of Thursday 17th to hear the words “One Direction fans longed for a reunion. Today those fans are mourning his death” left me with cringe-induced nausea. However far-reaching their fame, surely fans’ loss of the tenuous possibility of a boyband’s comeback pales when compared to the devastation a 31 year-old’s death causes for his seven year-old son, parents, partner, sisters and friends – those who actually knew him?

Reading about fans immediately hoarding the hotel grounds almost immediately after emergency services removed Payne’s body failed to alleviate the sick feeling. Stories and photos of sobbing, singing and attempts to communicate with Payne through an Ouija board reveal how alarmingly we have abandoned self-awareness when it comes to celebrities. Our emotional connection with their work merges into one with the person themself, a fixation which can become dehumanising in the face of their death.

“Celebrity death has become a chance to churn out cringey ‘tributes’ which teeter between satirically sentimental and outright disrespectful”

Recounting their Wednesday Revs on the walk to lectures the next day, my friends related the jarring experience of hearing ‘Strip That Down’ blasting out only minutes after the singer’s death was announced – followed up by ‘Staying Alive’. The dilemma of whether it was too crude for them to dance captures how celebrity death has become a chance to churn out cringey ‘tributes’ which teeter between satirically sentimental and outright disrespectful.

The discomfort I had been feeling was articulated when Cheryl Cole declared coverage of her former partner’s death “abhorrent”. It’s telling that most reports didn’t even consider why. A combination of the public’s lack of self-interrogation, and this very failure from journalists to second-guess themselves, has engendered a vicious spiral of constantly claiming back another inch from the dignity afforded to celebrities.

While the radio bulletin made my stomach lurch, articles published about Payne’s death over the following weeks have been enough to make me sick. Most disgusting was TMZ publishing a photograph of the singer’s body only moments after his death. The fact this was deemed acceptable is repulsive, but also revealing; the drive for coverage saturated with as many gory details as possible is pushing journalists to deny the deceased dignity just to fulfil readers’ curiosity. Speculation-feeding articles like the Metro’s minute-by-minute account of the day of Payne’s death underline how competing over clicks has driven outlets to fight over how much they can tell us. Yet the creation of the Wikipedia page ‘Death of Liam Payne’, populated with details only six days after his death, might suggest the media is merely responding to a public appetite for morbid information.

“The drive for coverage saturated with as many gory details as possible is pushing journalists to deny the deceased dignity just to fulfil readers’ curiosity”

Maybe it’s unfair to lump the public and the media in the same boat; many fans blocked the press’ cameras from prying into the moment Payne’s father visited tributes. Nevertheless, the voyeuristic presence of hundreds of teenage girls as he took in their cards, photos and candles still seemed like an intrusion, albeit a less explicitly exploitative one.

Journalist Michael Buerk’s criticism of the BBC for deciding that “the most important thing that had happened in the world was that a drugged up, faded, boy band singer had fallen off a balcony” is unnecessarily cruel. But there’s some truth to his suggestion that a celebrity’s death shouldn’t keep filling our front pages in the days and weeks that follow. It’s easy to blame Instagram for enabling our invasive habits, but news outlets can powerfully shape our personal responses, determining what information we feel we’re entitled to. Striking a balance between serving public interest and making ethical editorial decisions is always difficult, but the notion of what is appropriate to publicly anatomise after a death is becoming distorted beyond recognition.

It is somewhat inevitable that celebrities become more image than individual, and reflecting (critically) upon their impact on the world remains important. But tributes must be articulated with greater sensitivity and self-awareness, otherwise our future relationship with those in the public eye looks pretty bleak. Fine, you might truly feel devastated that One Direction can now never reunite. But think before you post that on a public platform where a child could one day see that your first thought, after hearing his father fell 45 feet to his death, was that you had been denied the nostalgia of blasting a reunion song on Spotify.