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You May Know Me from YouTube: (Micro‐)Celebrity in Social Media
Abstract
While fame has existed for centuries, celebrity is inextricably linked to media. This chapter uses examples from a popular social media technologies to analyze how the particular technical features of social media applications, combined with the prevalence of celebrity-focused mass culture, enable individuals to inhabit a popular subjectivity that resembles, that of the “conventionally” famous. In examining the increasingly prominent place of celebrities in mass culture, scholars have used the terms “celebritization” and “celebrification”, often, and confusingly, interchangeably. The chapter explains these terms, suggesting that the model of micro-celebrity in internet studies might help us further understand the shifts and changes in the relationship between celebrity and society outside the landscape of television and film. The chapter also talks about Tumblr, YouTube, and the online attention economy. It highlights that the ability to view oneself as a celebrity, attract attention, and manage an audience, may become a necessary skill.
... Twitch's unique technological features, including real-time interaction, video and audio content, and the streaming chat function, establish a different dynamic between content creators and their audiences. These features grant streamers credibility and influence, as they can directly engage with their audience in real time [8][9][10]. Viewers, in turn, often perceive streamers as more relatable and accountable than political figures on other social media platforms [11]. ...
... Hence, Twitch provides an ideal platform for political content creators to brand themselves as micro-celebrities. By using webcams and microphones [24] to create a personal connection with their audience, they can establish credibility [8] and foster a sense of community through parasocial relationships [42]. This connection can be further strengthened by including links to other social media platforms in their profiles [24], enhancing their overall engagement with the audience. ...
... Therefore, most of channels are likely to have around 70 unique users who have posted at least one chat post during its streaming. While a smaller audience size can foster active political discussions among users and streamers, establishing parasocial relationships [42] and gaining micro-celebrity status [8] may be challenging due to their dependence on popularity. The mean chat frequency of all users in a channel displays a nearly normal distribution, whereas the maximum chat frequency has a weak left skew, as confirmed by D'Agostino's skewness test (skew = -0.307, ...
As new technologies rapidly reshape patterns of political communication, platforms like Twitch are transforming how people consume political information. This entertainment-oriented live streaming platform allows us to observe the impact of technologies such as “live-streaming” and “streaming-chat” on political communication. Despite its entertainment focus, Twitch hosts a variety of political actors, including politicians and pundits. This study explores Twitch politics by addressing three main questions: 1) Who are the political Twitch streamers? 2) What content is covered in political streams? 3) How do audiences of political streams interact with each other? To identify political streamers, I leveraged the Twitch API and supervised machine-learning techniques, identifying 574 political streamers. I used topic modeling to analyze the content of political streams, revealing seven broad categories of political topics and a unique pattern of communication involving context-specific “emotes.” Additionally, I created user-reference networks to examine interaction patterns, finding that a small number of users dominate the communication network. This research contributes to our understanding of how new social media technologies influence political communication, particularly among younger audiences.
... To gain visibility and popularity, opinion leaders develop an intimacy with the public (Duffy, 2016;Marwick, 2015), interacting directly and constantly with their followers, giving the impression of transparency of their personal lives and the content creation process. But although they usually show some criticism of traditional media, they Twitter has been renamed to "X". ...
... Traditional political elites (politicians) and opinion leaders have different motivations to publicly express their ideas. While politicians aim to persuade voters (Spirling, 2016) and to be effective in electoral campaigns (Tetlock, 1981;Conway III et al., 2012), opinion leaders (here considered as: celebrities, journalists, and youtubers) target popularity (Zilinsky et al., 2020;Duffy, 2016;Marwick, 2015;Lewis, 2019). ...
... Similar patterns are observed on youtubers and opinion leaders in general, as they usually adopt micro-celebrities' tactics to gain visibility and popularity. They develop an intimacy with the public (Duffy, 2016;Marwick, 2015), interacting directly and constantly with their followers, giving the impression of transparency of their personal lives and the content creation process (Lewis, 2019). Increasingly, they have been participating more in politics. ...
A desconfiança política é um elemento crucial para a sobrevivência da democracia. Embora represente um direito dos cidadãos de contestar algumas irregularidades, também pode representar a percepção dos cidadãos de que a democracia falhou, cortando os seus laços com agentes e processos políticos. Dados recentes mostram que os brasileiros confiam cada vez menos nas instituições políticas, como o Congresso Nacional. Esta atitude pode ser influenciada não só pelos políticos, mas também por aquilo aqui considerado como “líderes de opinião” – o que inclui: celebridades, youtubers e jornalistas. No entanto, ambos os grupos têm motivações diferentes para falar sobre política. Este artigo pretende responder se os líderes de opinião expressam mais desconfiança política no Twitter do que os políticos. Segundo a literatura estudada, os cidadãos expressam desconfiança política com base na avaliação de incompetência técnica, questões éticas e percepções de interesses incompatíveis com o sistema político ou com os seus agentes. Propõe-se, aqui, medir a desconfiança, por meio do texto (tweet), como um índice baseado na frequência de palavras negativas, moral-emocionais e relacionadas ao riso. As pontuações variam de 0 a 3. Compararam-se os dois grupos. Contrariamente às expectativas dos autores, os resultados mostram que os políticos publicam mais tweets sobre as instituições e desconfiam mais do que os líderes de opinião. Um achado é interessante: não são os extremos ideológicos que mais produzem tweets desconfiados.
... Based on ethnographic fieldwork among influencers and content analyses of influencer posts (e.g. Abidin, 2014Abidin, , 2016Gudmundsd ottir and Chia, 2019;Marwick, 2015Marwick, , 2016, three self-presentation strategies can be discerned: layperson, opinion leader and micro-celebrity. A few studies examined the effects of the presence of specific self-presentation elements (i.e. ...
... In particular, in relation to self-presentation, credibility seems crucial. Previous studies on influencer self-presentation strategies and source credibility were either qualitative (Abidin, 2014(Abidin, , 2016Duffy and Hund, 2015;Marwick, 2015Marwick, , 2016McQuarrie et al., 2013) or correlational (Gudmundsd ottir and Chia, 2019) in nature. The present study adds to the literature by examining the causal relationships between influencers' self-presentation strategies and source credibility. ...
... Eisend, 2006;Martensen et al., 2018;Munukka et al., 2016;Pornpitakpan, 2004), so far no study has empirically examined within one study whether source credibility explains the effectiveness of influencer self-presentation on brand responses. Drawing upon self-presentation and source credibility theory (Abidin, 2014(Abidin, , 2016Gudmundsd ottir and Chia, 2019; MIP Hovland et al., 1953;Marwick, 2015Marwick, , 2016Ohanian, 1990), the present study adds to the literature by investigating the relations between influencer self-presentation strategies, source credibility dimensions and brand responses in one mediation model. As such, we provide theoretical insights into the mechanisms that underlie self-presentation effects on persuasion. ...
Purpose
Self-presentation is an important aspect of influencer marketing. Drawing upon self-presentation theory and source credibility theory, this study aimed to unravel how the self-presentation strategies of a layperson, opinion leadership and micro-celebrity influence source credibility (i.e. trustworthiness, expertise, physical attractiveness and social attractiveness) and how source credibility, in turn, affects brand responses.
Design/methodology/approach
An online experiment among female participants ( N = 229) was conducted. Participants were shown a sponsored blog in which the influencer presented herself as either a layperson, an opinion leader or a micro-celebrity.
Findings
The study demonstrated that the presentation strategy of a layperson was more persuasive than a micro-celebrity presentation because of higher levels of (1) trust and (2) social attractiveness. In addition, opinion leaders were perceived as having more expertise than laypeople and, therefore, positively enhanced brand responses.
Research limitations/implications
The current findings provide relevant insights into the theoretical mechanisms (i.e. expertise, trustworthiness and social attractiveness) that explain the effects of self-presentation strategies on brand responses.
Practical implications
Our findings imply that credibility perceptions determine the persuasiveness of the SMI. This study showed that layperson and opinion leadership self-presentation strategies are relatively more persuasive.
Originality/value
This study is the first to show that influencers’ self-presentation strategies determine how people respond to the brands that influencers promote. In addition, we show that these effects are explained by the influencers’ trust, social attractiveness and expertise.
... Others have argued that SMIs are professionals who approach the cultivation of their online persona as a job and generate income (Albindin, 2017). Some scholars have proposed boundary conditions for SMIs, in order to differentiate SMIs from traditional celebrities and to highlight instead their "micro-celebrity" (e.g., Khamis et al. 2017;Marwick, 2016;Schoutten et al., 2019). Instructional marketing resources in the popular press tend to be more inclusive in their definition of an SMI, proposing a continuum of SMIs ranging from traditional celebrity to 55 #MarketingFaith micro-celebrity. ...
... Megachurch pastors also used Twitter to publicize goods and to encourage action. Similar to secular micro-celebrities who promote goods that will resonate with the idiosyncratic desires of their niche audience (Marwick, 2016), so too did megachurch pastors cast promotions as the fulfillment of the needs of the online flock. Three subcategories were identified within the larger promotion theme: personal promotion, network promotion, and church promotion. ...
This study examines megachurch pastors as social media influencers (SMIs), using a qualitative content analysis of Twitter communication from pastors of the 20 largest megachurches in the United States. The research found that megachurch pastors utilize similar communication practices to secular SMIs, such as self-promotion and persona construction, but with modifications reflecting their religious identity and pastoral role. The analysis identified three key themes: promotion, rapport building, and edification. While pastors adopted common SMI strategies, variations existed in how they configured their online self-presentation, potentially due to factors like pastoral persona, social identity, or negotiations with the tensions of the pastoral role. The findings highlight the unique challenges and opportunities presented by the intersection of religious authority and social media influence. Further research is needed to examine follower responses, the boundaries of SMI designation, and the communication strategies used by SMIs navigating potential inconsistencies between their role and audience expectations.
... Una micro-celebridad es una persona corriente que, emulando a las celebrities o personas famosas, comparte información estratégicamente para ser consumida por otras. Para ello interacciona regularmente con sus seguidores, considerados como fans, con el fin de potenciar y mantener la popularidad y la atención entre su audiencia, así como dentro de la red (Khamis et al., 2017;Marwick, 2016). En este estudio, adoptamos el planteamiento de Marwick (2016), que especifica que la micro-celebridad es lo que alguien hace (y no lo que es), y se refiere al conjunto de prácticas, técnicas de autopresentación y formas de pensar sobre uno mismo como si fuera una celebridad o persona famosa. ...
... En este estudio, adoptamos el planteamiento de Marwick (2016), que especifica que la micro-celebridad es lo que alguien hace (y no lo que es), y se refiere al conjunto de prácticas, técnicas de autopresentación y formas de pensar sobre uno mismo como si fuera una celebridad o persona famosa. De este modo, el yo se percibe estratégicamente como una mercancía para el consumo de la audiencia, sin que el tamaño de la misma sea necesariamente importante (Marwick, 2016). ...
Propósito : Este estudio analiza el profesorado de Educación Física (EF) que adopta el rol de influencer en la red social Instagram. Método : Mediante un estudio de casos descriptivo, se han analizado durante siete meses los perfiles de tres influencers españoles (159 post y 73 stories) con un análisis temático. Resultados : El rol de influencer de EF es producto de un complejo engranaje en el que la difusión de su conocimiento y su identidad como personas expertas se desarrolla a través de estrategias de micro-celebridad y el manejo de las funcionalidades de la propia plataforma orientadas a potenciar su visibilidad y, en última instancia, monetizar su contenido. Conclusiones : Se concluye con las tensiones que existen para la EF en torno a este fenómeno dentro del contexto educativo neoliberal y la necesidad de que la formación del profesorado se adapte a esta nueva realidad educativa.
... It is at this level that the capitalizing intimacy where the aspect of intimacy (Raun, 2018;Annisa, 2022) that seeks to be built through the performance of self-content on social media can become a commodity, support social recognition, and as a tool in advocating interaction between the audience and microcelebrities. Authenticity and intimacy are strategic elements of their way to reach more followers (Marwick, 2015). This kind of visibility is important for an influencer who needs recognition and legitimacy for everything he does and conveys to his audience of followers on social media. ...
... The authenticity and intimacy in every upload that depicts her figure, her daily experiences ranging from household appliances to skincare products used at home are supporting indicators for an influencer like herself. This is also what Marwick emphasized (Marwick, 2015). In his argument that authenticity and intimacy are strategic elements of their strategy to reach followers. ...
Religious discussions among previous socio-religious scholars used to focus more on authority, righteousness, commodification efforts, and the pursuit of financial gains by religious figures. However, this seems less relevant in today's digital age, where people can access and share religious knowledge from various sources. This article aims to explore this phenomenon by examining the approach of a da'wah influencer, Ayu Momalula. She presents counseling da'wah content as a form of self-expression, creating an ideal Muslim woman figure for her social media followers. Using an exploratory qualitative method and online ethnographic approach, primary data was obtained from interviews via WhatsApp and Zoom, as well as from observation of content on her Instagram accounts and books. The study argues that Ayu Momalula's counseling da'wah activities aim to establish herself as an ideal Muslim woman, supporting her authority as a religious micro-celebrity. The article analyzes her subjectivity as a Muslim women micro-celebrity, highlighting her representation of a pious wife and modern mompreneur through content visualization on social media. This study suggests that Ayu Momalula actively promotes productivity in both work and preaching to her specific target audience.
... (d) Participation in and Utilization of social media With growing popularity and ease of use (Farguhar, 2010;Lau, 2016;Marwick, 2016;Khamis, Ang, & Welling, 2017), social media has become a rising arena for 'star construction and star-fan dynamics' (Lau, 2016:233). Many performing artists and film stars start to pay increasing attention to this new site for promoting their artist or star persona and negotiating their simultaneous presence in cinema and in cyberspace (Lau, 2016:233). ...
... For instance, Jackie Chan once made a negative comment on China's television sets quality that they might explore (Foreman, 2009); but also said in a panel discussion at the annual Boao Forum for Asia in 2009 that more freedom means more chaos in Hong Kong (Lau, 2016:232). Jackie Chan is perhaps not that savvy in social media tools in view of his limited English language ability, but he was innovative enough to accept the new communication tool of social media; and willing to strategically enlist the help of his personnel to help him based on his awareness of the social media's power in generating and maintaining global recognition nowadays (Shelton, 2012;Marwick, 2016;Lau, 2016;Khamis, Ang and Welling, 2017). ...
Purpose: This study reviews available literature on how Jackie Chan applied the personal branding concept as an innovative strategy for him to gain global recognition and a megastar position. Design/methodology/approach: This is a literature search type study focusing on Jackie Chan as the case subject of successful personal branding. Various literature sources including Jackie Chan's (1998) own autobiography ('I am Jackie Chan: My Life in Action') and published news reportage are used for content analysis. Findings: Five factors are identified as drivers of Jackie Chan's personal branding success: a) the ambition that has been conceived and announced to the world, b) co-authored his own autobiography in English, c) creating unique values to differentiate himself from others as a way of defining his own identity, d) negotiating between the role of a celebrity and a star, and lastly, e) strategy to utilize social media and participating in it. In sum, his strategic and innovative use of personal branding actions helped him to promote his aforesaid uniqueness and persona to amass global recognition, thereby developing his great stardom for the last four decades. Research limitations/implications: The study relies heavily on the content of Jackie Chan's autobiography which may limit the study's comprehensiveness of review and analysis. Personal encounters of the subject person might be too unique and situational to be generalized. Practical implications: Strategies used by Jackie Chan in how he builds his personal branding benefit performing artists to be used as their prerequisite skill set in the film industry rather than totally dependent upon film production companies. Originality/value: This study has built on Jackie Chan's example to demonstrate the liberation of performing artists in unleashing their potential energies and personal uniqueness; establishing and promoting themselves strategically toward their targeted audience; and innovatively steering their fate and future in view of different challenges under different contexts along their career journey.
... It is the connections between leaders and followers that create a relationship where the leaders invest and inspire in the followers and the followers also give back to the leader in terms of support and allegiance which has a benefit, such as new direction and new fortune that will be enjoyed by all. The development of social media and its ease of use (Farguhar, et al., 2010;Lau, 2016;Marwick, 2016;Khamis, Ang, & Welling, 2017) has changed the nature and mode of such relationship between the stars and the audience (Lau, 2016:233). Many performing artists and film stars start to pay increasing attention to this new site for promoting their leadership and influence (Lau, 2016:233). ...
... In response to the challenge of losing the traditional monopoly over the star texts or activities in the social media context, Chan adjusted his personal branding strategies to the 'participatory and open nature' of social media. Though Chan is not that savvy in social media tools, he was socially adaptable (Shelton, 2012) in enlisting the help of his personnel to help him based on his awareness and acceptance of social media's power in generating and maintaining his leadership on the global stage (Shelton, 2012;Marwick, 2016;Lau, 2016;Khamis, Ang and Welling, 2017). He launched 'fan' accounts on different social media sites, such as the Flickr utilizing its functionality to allow users' comments and tags to others' pictures or photos, thus facilitating topic-specific groups. ...
This paper will analyze how Jackie Chan, a famous and successful performing artist, director, and producer of martial arts comedy films, has been developing his leadership in his field through his personal branding strategy. This paper examined Jackie Chan's personal branding journey from his early stage of career development till his transformation from an action movie star to a celebrity. By means of qualitative research methodology, such as primary material from Jacky's autobiography, secondary data mined from the extant literature, and interview records, Jackie Chan was found to display and promote his leadership through building and using his personal brand both on and off the screen. The primary objective of this paper is to provide a road map and practical strategies for leaders-to-be who wish to exemplify their leadership for attracting and keeping their followers.
... Moreover, the uniqueness and extraordinariness of an individual, as mentioned by Participant "10", contribute to their fame. This idea resonates with the concept of "micro-influencer", where individuals achieve fame by creating a personal brand that stands out from the ordinary (Marwick, 2015). Participant "12" further added that famous individuals should convey useful messages to society, reflecting the growing expectation for influencers to use their platforms for social good (Cheng et al., 2024;Gräve & Greff, 2018). ...
Purpose: This study explores how different factors collectively influence the effectiveness of social media influencer endorsements as well as shaping consumer behavior and brand perception.Study design/methodology/approach: The research employs a qualitative hybrid thematic approach, integrating inductive strategies from interviews with a deductive framework based on existing theories. This method allows for a thorough exploration of the factors affecting influencer endorsement effectiveness.Sample and data: The sample includes 14 female Instagram users, aged 18-30, selected through non-probability purposive sampling. Semi-structured interviews were used to gather data.Results: Four key themes emerged: Influencer Fame, Engagement, Credibility, and First Impressions. Fame is shaped by content quality, follower count, and message value. Engagement builds trust through interactive, meaningful content. Credibility is tied to perceived expertise, trustworthiness, and authenticity. First impressions strongly influence consumer perceptions.Originality/value: This study fills a gap by examining multiple factors simultaneously, offering a comprehensive understanding of influencer effectiveness and valuable insights for marketers seeking to refine their strategies.Research limitations/implications: The study’s qualitative nature and specific demographic limit generalizability. Future research with larger, more diverse samples and quantitative methods is recommended. Additionally, the fast-changing social media landscape may challenge the ongoing relevance of findings, suggesting the need for longitudinal studies.
... Según IAB Spain (2022), el seguimiento de influencers se concreta en un 53% de los usuarios de redes sociales, dato que significa una de las acciones principales. YouTube (2005), Instagram (2010) y Twitch (2011), en este orden de aparición cronológica, son tres medios sociales que permiten reflejar la interacción de los adolescentes con los influencers, quienes actúan como micro-celebridades (Marwick, 2015;Tufekci, 2013) o creadores de contenido que se convierten en modelos a seguir, especialmente en los videoblogs (Simonsen, 2012). Además, el análisis de esta interacción debe tener en cuenta la negociación que los jóvenes establecen a partir de sus propios comentarios sobre el uso y el significado del consumo de estas plataformas. ...
Los creadores de contenido en plataformas como YouTube, Instagram y Twitch son una parte fundamental de la cultura adolescente, ya que actúan como influencers, líderes y referentes en el consumo de productos multimedia dirigidos al público adolescente. La investigación en comunicación debe intervenir en el análisis de las posibilidades y riesgos de esos espacios virtuales, en los que no solo se organizan prácticas de consumo sino también formas de convivencia y valores de los sistemas democráticos. El objetivo de este trabajo es estudiar las interacciones comunicativas que se generan en redes sociales como YouTube e Instagram en los perfiles de los influencers con más seguidores entre adolescentes en España, a partir del número de contenidos generados y de las respuestas que reciben de los usuarios. Mediante técnicas de procesamiento del lenguaje natural (NLP) y a partir del análisis del sentimiento, se han estudiado 10 influencers con más predicamento extraídos de 2.749 cuestionarios realizados entre jóvenes de entre 12 y 18 años en España. Los resultados muestran que mientras el número de visualizaciones está fuertemente correlacionado con la cantidad de likes (me gusta) que se reflejan en los 2.142 vídeos, no hay una correlación fuerte con el número de comentarios. Este dato señala la necesaria revisión del concepto de participación de la audiencia. Además, si bien en la expresión de emociones entre influencers y seguidores prevalece el “sesgo de positividad”, el análisis de polaridades de los títulos de los vídeos analizados tiene un elevado porcentaje de neutro y negativo, como estrategias de captación de la atención. En relación al análisis de las word-clouds, se observa que los comentarios de influencers y seguidores suelen tener una polaridad positiva y neutra, bajo un modelo de comunicación redundante en su bidireccionalidad. Las conclusiones muestran implicaciones sociales y en el márquetin del poder de los influencers.
... • YouTubers (Andrejevic, 2009;Bishop, 2018aBishop, , 2018bBishop, , 2019Cunningham & Craig, 2017;Glatt & Banet-Weiser, 2022;Glatt, 2022a;Marwick, 2015;Postigo, 2016;Siciliano, 2021) and video editors (Delfanti & Phan, 2024) Researchers have not only illuminated the conditions and experiences of various occupational positions and myriad forms of labor undergirding the production and circulation of hardware, software, and content but have also explored the dynamics of work in relation to topics such as: ...
This book is a first-of-its-kind critical interdisciplinary introduction to the economic, political, cultural, and technological dimensions of work and labor in the rapidly growing digital media and entertainment industries (DMEI). The book presents a comprehensive guide to understanding the key contexts, theories, methods, debates, and struggles surrounding work and labor in the DMEI. Packed with current examples and accessible research findings, the book highlights the changing conditions and experiences of work in the DMEI. It surveys the DMEI’s key sectors and occupations and considers the complex intersections between labor and social power relations of class, gender, and race, as well as tensions between creativity and commerce, freedom and control, meritocracy and hierarchy, and precarity and equity, diversity, and inclusivity. Chapters also explore how work in the DMEI is being reshaped by capitalism and corporations, government and policies, management, globalization, platforms, A.I., and worker collectives such as unions and cooperatives. This book is a critical introduction to this growing area of research, teaching, learning, life, labor, and organizing, with an eye to understanding work in the DMEI and changing it, for the better. Offering a broad overview of the field, this textbook is an indispensable resource for instructors, undergraduates, postgraduates, and scholars.
... Wichtig ist beim Begriff, dass die Vorsilbe "Micro" nicht eine geringe Popularität zum Ausdruck bringt, sondern darauf hinweist, dass der Celebritystatus nicht durch klassische Medien erworben wurde, sondern durch digitale Netzwerke (vgl.Marwick 2015). ...
Zusammenfassung
Social-Media-Influencer:innen sind längst nicht mehr nur in der Werbung tätig und promoten Produkte, sondern sie äußern sich politisch und werden zu Akteur:innen in der politisch-medialen Öffentlichkeit. Doch wie ist das zu erklären? Wie schaffen es diese politisch-medialen Outsider, dass ihre Stimme Gewicht erhält und sie in Beziehungskonstellationen der öffentlichen Kommunikation aufgenommen werden? Um dies zu erklären, entwickelt der Artikel ein relationales Theoriekonzept. Dieses konzipiert die politisch-mediale Öffentlichkeit als Assemblage und argumentiert, dass sich Politische Online-Influencer:innen (POI) in Beziehungskonstellationen etablieren, weil sie im hybriden Mediensystem den Kommunikationsraum mit klassischen Intermediären teilen, weil ihre sozialen Beziehungen und ihr Status als Micro-Celebrities auf Social-Media-Plattformen als kapitalwerter Vorteil wirken und sich der Etablierungsprozess verstärkt, sobald sie durch erste Beziehungen mit klassischen Intermediären legitimiert werden. Die Etablierung wird als Prozess verstanden, der sich in der triadischen Beziehungskonstellation zwischen Influencer:innen, ihrem Publikum auf Social-Media-Plattformen und klassischen Intermediären aus Politik und Medien abspielt. Das relationale Theoriekonzept kombiniert Ansätze der politischen Kommunikations- und Journalismusforschung mit der Celebrityforschung und der Kapitaltheorie Pierre Bourdieus. Nachdem das relationale Theoriekonzept entworfen wurde, wird eine normative Bewertung der Beiträge von POI zur öffentlichen Kommunikation vorgenommen. Es werden Vermittlungsleistungen identifiziert, die neue Akteure wie die POI erbringen, und es wird auf die Gefahren eingegangen, welche die journalistisch anmutende Kommunikation durch Personen birgt, die nicht immer eine journalistische Ausbildung besitzen.
... Social media facilitates the formation and maintenance of psychological connections across varied groups without requiring mutual interaction. Media figures profoundly influence their fans' growth and development through genuine life sharing, self-expression, and fostering intimacy through emotional engagement (Marwick, 2015). Active engagement of fans on social media enhances their well-being and encourages value co-creation between content creators and the audience (Aoki, K., 2022). ...
... Contents promoted in the media such as interviews conducted with divas who address personal problems like bipolar disorder (Wong et al., 2017), eating disorders, depression, drug addiction (Franssen, 2020), who had their sexuality exposed (Tsai, 2012) or their intimate photos leaked (Marwick, 2015), or who admit to be under pressure to fit a certain beauty standard (Ferguson et al., 2020;Rocha & Frid, 2018) point towards divas' deglamorization, since they evidence aspects that go against their glamour status and introduce a new celebrity production scenario. ...
Digital influencers who spread information about pop divas approach the deglamorization of their lives by paratextualizing activities carried out by them in their daily routines. Accordingly, this current study advocates that this deglamorization process points towards the “topification” of divas’ bodies, since it highlights their urgency to distance themselves from the utopianism required to keep their bodies as glamorized bodies. Thus, its aim is to analyze how Brazilian digital influencers paratextualize pop divas deglamorization process by subjecting influencers’ discourse to Foucault’s Discourse Analysis. The herein analyzed research file comprised news reports published on gossip blogs about pop divas. Results have evidenced two discursive formations: the first one refers to the formation and promotion of pop divas’ image and the second one reveals the support given to them. This result has shown that influencers paratextualize the deglamorization of pop divas by humanizing them.
KEYWORDS
Pop Divas; Digital Influencers; Paratext; Utopian Body; Foucault
... These interactions allow bidirectional dialogue and can be seen as co-constructed between the audience and the producer, who uses specific techniques to increase these feelings (Abidin, 2015). Marwick (2015) talked in this context about "strategic intimacy." ...
Little is known about the characteristics and dynamics within SMI–audience interactions and relationships from the side of SMI. Using interview data from 19 ( N = 19) SMI, this study aims (1) to increase the insights on the development (i.e. predictors and dimensions) and dynamics (i.e. outcomes and feedback loops) of SMI’s social capital and (2) use the social capital framework to develop a typology of different SMI–audience relationships. The resulting typology proposes four types of relationships. The first is the casual follower relationship, characterized by limited intimacy and low-effort contact. Second, the positive fan relationship involves typical fan behavior. These relationships are important for SMI because they offer psychological and commercial gains. Finally, the negative hater and the negative anti-fan relationship were distinguished. Whereas the first is a temporary superficial relationship, the latter has intimacy and reciprocity, which stimulates SMI’s investment. The theoretical and practical implications for SMI and marketing are discussed.
... Scholars have described some of the demerits associated with SM use. Marwick (2015) noted that professional communities often feature the presence of micro-celebrities. While this may serve as an inspiration to some, SM may contribute to teachers developing problematic visions of what it means to be a "good enough teacher" (Pittard 2017: 30). ...
... Celebrities' higher social positions provide them with the power to impact accepted cultural expectations and trends (see Driessens, 2012). Social media has given rise to the "micro-celebrity" which Marwick (2015) defined as "a self-presentation technique in which people view themselves as a public persona to be consumed by others, use strategic intimacy to appeal to followers, and regard their audience as fans" (p. 333). ...
... His infectious enthusiasm has the ability to make even the most ordinary toy seem captivating. The straightforward and unadorned video production allows the toys and their stories to take center stage, providing easily accessible content (Biel et al., 2011;Biel et al., 2013;Marwick, 2015). 4 Community engagement "Grand Illusions" has gained a significant following, with millions of subscribers and 586 million views on its videos. ...
This study examines Tim Rowett's YouTube channel, "Grand Illusions," which captures and maintains positive viewer engagement in the digital domain. Through a comprehensive YouTube channel analysis, this paper identifies key factors contributing to its success, including collaboration and influence, educational impact, legacy and continuity, personal style, and community engagement. Rowett, known for his extensive toy collection and in-depth knowledge of their mechanics and history, employs an educational and engaging presentation style that fosters a positive and inclusive online community. His approach entertains and educates, making him a valuable digital resource that inspires viewers of all ages. This research proposes the CECCE (Collaboration, Education, Continuity, Community Engagement) model as a framework for content creators seeking to replicate the success of "Grand Illusions." The study emphasizes the potential of tailored, passionate content to cultivate healthy digital communities and underscores the significant role of digital content creators in shaping online culture. The proposed framework will guide creators to achieve similar success.
... Firstly, there is an agonistic aspect to vlogging. Ashton and Patel (2018) position it as a form of competitive entrepreneurism, with Marwick (2015) labeling vloggers as micro-celebrities creating video content to gain approval and increase audiences. This can seem at odds with a more communitarian ethos attached to post-sports such as mountain running. ...
This article investigates the rise in participant-based running video blogs (vlogs), where audiences are brought on runs from the point-of-view of the runner. Examining Irish YouTube channels that create content around trail and mountain running, it focuses on a number of themes, including emotionality, place, and sociability in storytelling. In doing so, it questions the ways in which the activity of filming encapsulates the act of off-road running and the quest for vertiginous experiences. It explores the motivations of content creators, potential tensions with the ethos of alternative sports, and interactivity between producers and viewers. It positions this coverage as unique within the sports media space, providing first-hand, dizzying accounts of a niche sporting activity.
... While promoted on a number of platforms, for this study I focus on highly engaged, highly influential NoFappers on Twitter, which is a publicly accessible (and thus not "secluded," see Hartmann 2020) social media platform where users engage across lines of sociopolitical difference to seek and effect affiliation (Zappavigna 2012). Twitter users often behave as "micro-celebrities" (Page 2012) which is a "self-presentation technique in which people view themselves as a public persona to be consumed by others, use strategic intimacy to appeal to followers, and regard their audience as fans" (Marwick 2015). Using the data set I created for another study (Burnett 2022) I identified five high-profile Twitter accounts with relatively high followings. ...
This is the draft of a chapter due to appear in Del Percio, A. and Wei, L. (Eds.) Language and Mobilities. Handbooks in Applied Linguistics. Berlin: DeGruyter.
... Compared to platforms that have offered primarily text-based or single-frame image content, TikTok's video-based format may allow educators to more richly experience classrooms, teaching practices, and education resources. Additionally, while Instagram has been characterized by attention to "aspirational and pristine" lifestyles and archetypal notions of beauty (Abidin, 2020, p. 83; see also Marwick, 2015), TikTok has been defined by more of a focus on "crafting a relatable performance" and "entertaining" (p. 83). ...
Although TikTok is among the world’s most popular social media platforms, its use by educators has received limited attention. TikTok features particular opportunities and challenges that could impact educator use. This research explores educator (N = 415) TikTok use through an online survey. Participants tended to engage with
the platform more for personal than professional reasons, but nonetheless found content that influenced their professional knowledge and practice. Humor was prevalent in participant TikTok engagement. Social media literacy is becoming increasingly important for educators, as participants reported various challenges associated with TikTok, and many lacked awareness of key issues with the platform.
... The post-2010 dominance of the digital platform, however, entails a commercialization of the online space that encourages the generation of narcissistic and self-absorbed cultures rather than participatory in the civic sense of the term (Khamis, Ang and Welling, 2017). The figure of the Internet celebrity or influencer is paradigmatic in this regard (Abidin, 2018;Marwick, 2015), as what Sophie Bishop calls the "Influencer creep", whose key tenets include "self-branding, optimisation and a performance of authenticity", permeates various online industries and cultures, such as the artworld (2023: 2). While influencers, similar to traditional celebrities, can advocate for social issues that contribute to progressive change, their activity is calculated to be as safe and risk-free as possible; becoming controversial can lead to public image ruination and therefore loss of income. ...
In this article, we look at how preeminent Russian-speaking influencers spread sensibilities of entrepreneurialism and post-feminism on social media platforms, and specifically Instagram. Drawing on platform studies, critical theory and material from influencer accounts, we explore the ways that platform-based spiritualities are embedded in the neoliberal economies of self-presentation, micro-celebrity and branding in Russia and beyond. We understand spirituality as a broader figure encompassing both external beliefs in the divine, such as in magic, spirits and forces that lie beyond human understanding, as well as internal beliefs in spiritual tropes for reaching self-development, including exercise, mindfulness and life coaching, among others. By amplifying presentations of the self around regimes of happiness, positivity, self-growth and unfettered joy, platform spiritualities nullify critical thought and normalize a depoliticized conception of selfhood in the Russian public space. Influencers encourage women to focus on themselves, travel, dress up, dream about wealthy husbands and exotic sensations, and prioritize their own well-being and empowerment over social or collective concerns. The depoliticized discourse of these influencers is largely an outcome of the social media imperative to produce safe and riskless content under the fear of cancellation, which can lead to a loss of advertising and other forms of revenue. We argue that, rather than being simply progressive vehicles for democratic publics and participatory cultures, social media platforms, and Instagram in particular, are key to intensifying an entrepreneurial selfhood that relies on magical thinking and spiritual guidance from abstract authorities in repressive political contexts.
This study investigates parasocial relationships between adolescents and a genre of TikTok microcelebrities who construct themselves as “Internet Parents.” We analyze Alex and Melinda Griswold's construction of themselves as the “mom and dad of TikTok” through their videos, comment sections, and off-platform interactive content. We ask how the Griswolds construct parasocial intimacy through modes of familial address, how viewers make sense of parasocial intimacy, and how the Griswolds monetize familial parasocial intimacy. Findings reveal how the Griswolds construct parasocial intimacy with their audience through the use of adoption rhetoric and engaging narrative structures, which viewers identify with by expressing their desire for a parent–child relationship with the Griswolds as their adopted children. However, these moments of parasocial intimacies become transformed through influencer economies that commodify social relationships. Ultimately, we consider the ethical obligations of the Griswolds to their target audience of adopted children .
The rise of influencers, as power-players in the social media landscape, is a defining feature of the digital era, one that has received much attention from a variety of social science disciplines. But despite the key role that language, along with other semiotic modes, plays in the construction and communication of influencer selves, discourse analytic and pragmatic research on the topic is lagging behind. This volume attempts to fill this void, by offering contextually sensitive insights into influencers’ multi-modal communication on a range of platforms. The contributions rework established modes and tools of discourse analysis and pragmatics to shed empirical light on influencer identities and tensions (e.g. doing authenticity vis-à-vis promoting brands). We specifically attend to (a) the interplay between media affordances and communication practices and (b) the co-constructional, interactive nature of influencer selves with networked audiences, ranging from ‘affect’ to ‘hate’. In addition to linguists, we hope that the volume will be of interest to scholars and students of social media communication, from sociological, cultural studies, anthropological and/or social psychological perspectives.
The rise of influencers, as power-players in the social media landscape, is a defining feature of the digital era, one that has received much attention from a variety of social science disciplines. But despite the key role that language, along with other semiotic modes, plays in the construction and communication of influencer selves, discourse analytic and pragmatic research on the topic is lagging behind. This volume attempts to fill this void, by offering contextually sensitive insights into influencers’ multi-modal communication on a range of platforms. The contributions rework established modes and tools of discourse analysis and pragmatics to shed empirical light on influencer identities and tensions (e.g. doing authenticity vis-à-vis promoting brands). We specifically attend to (a) the interplay between media affordances and communication practices and (b) the co-constructional, interactive nature of influencer selves with networked audiences, ranging from ‘affect’ to ‘hate’. In addition to linguists, we hope that the volume will be of interest to scholars and students of social media communication, from sociological, cultural studies, anthropological and/or social psychological perspectives.
Научният сборник „Комуникационен мениджмънт: Стратегическо създаване на комуникационни мениджъри“ се издава по повод 5-ата годишнина от началото на най-младата специалност във Факултета по журналистика и масова комуникация на Софийския университет „Св. Климент Охридски“ – „Комуникационен мениджмънт“ (създадена 2018 г.). Изданието включва студии, статии и емпирични изследвания на преподаватели, докторанти и учени, оформящи научна мрежа около специалността. Заглавията демонстрират основните полета на актуалното знание в областта: от традициите и перспективите на обучението по комуникационен мениджмънт (проф. д-р Веселина Вълканова, проф. д-р Теодора Петрова), изследванията върху комуникационната среда с анализа върху медийните динамики на комуникационния процес (проф. д-р Симеон Василев), делибератавната комуникация в българската медийна среда (проф. д-р Лилия Райчева), подходите за създаване на успешна комуникационна кампания (доц. д-р Светлана Станкова), динамиките в маркетинговите комуникации (доц. д-р Александър Христов), научната комуникация и комуникирането на научни публикации (доц. д-р Милена Цветкова, докторант Денка Данчева), официалната правна комуникация (доц. д-р Мариета Рабохчийска), баланса между бизнеса и журналистиката в управлението на медийните организации (гл. ас. д-р Анета Милкова); през контент мениджмънта – ролята на бранда в комуникационния мениджмънт (доц. д-р Стефан Серезлиев), мястото на медийното зелено съдържание за устойчиво развитие (доц. д-р Мануела Манлихерова), ефективните техники при медийно отразяване на политически и социални събития (проф. д-р Милко Петров); до обучението по комуникационен мениджмънт с анализ на научноизследователските и образователните подходи за работа с факти и данни (доц. д-р Мая Василева), обучението по комуникационен дизайн и новите предизвикателства на визуалната комуникация (гл. ас. д-р Мая Стоянова), обучението по компютърни технологии за бъдещите комуникационни специалисти (доц. д-р Ангел Ангелов, доц. д-р Филип Петров). Многообразието и пълноценните разработки, включени в настоящия сборник, дават представа за научните търсения на преподавателите и демонстрират натрупванията и професионалната рефлексия на колегията от катедрата, факултета и научната общност около специалността „Комуникационен мениджмънт“. Научният принос и приносът в развитието на едно ново академично поле се съчетава с осъзнатата професионална позиция, с отговорността и ангажимента на колегите към актуалните аспекти на комуникациите, съдържанията, медийния мениджмънт и стратегическото управление в тези области.
This article presents a conceptual and methodological account of a small porn bot network, focusing on its embeddedness within Instagram use. The analysis explores the gendered design of bots as platform-native personas, particularly their capacity to perform within the confines of Instagram's increasingly strict sexual content controls. We address three performative trajectories in the bot-exploited 'Instagrammatics' of identity play, social influence, and attention capture. We argue that a bot programmed to operate with sexual content to generate attention relies on the paradoxical blend of pornographic 'imagination' and social media 'authenticity'. For our analysis, we manually identified 30 porn bot accounts spamming in the comment sections of highly visible Instagram posts (those published by @justinbieber). We then collected associated metadata-bot profile names and images, comments and comment likers, followers and followings, bot content, and links in the bot profile bios. By variously situating and combining these data, we discuss how networked automation taps into the sexualized social scripts imitated by 'artificial' and 'authentic' users alike. Our findings point to how porn bots re-enact gender as a programmed set of instructions, adapting to Instagram's vision of acceptable sexuality and revealing its normative order.
Tracking the number of clicks, likes, and shares is more than just a pastime in this social media-fueled world, Thus Influencer Marketing has become the key to every brand's digital reach. Influencer marketing is not just the buzzword but the most happening ecosystem in 2024. Beyond merely creating content, influencers in India have developed into powerful economic catalysts in boosting the country's economy. The Country is anticipated to have a value of 28 billion Indian rupees by 2026, having reached 12 billion in 2022. The most popular category covered by influencers is lifestyle (14.32%) which is projected to rise at a CAGR of 25% during the next five years. Considering many individuals are interested in adopting healthier lifestyles, fitness influencers are becoming a powerful force on most social media platforms. This chapter is an extensive study exploring the realm of yoga influencers by examining the mutually beneficial relationship between influencers and companies on major social media platforms like Instagram and YouTube in the health and fitness segment influencers. This chapter also explores the motivations of influencer marketing on the expansion of yoga-related goods and services, as well as the total engagement and reach attained through influencer partnerships through qualitative methodologies using Nvivo and ATLAS.ti software. Ultimately, this chapter contributes to a broader conversation on the evolving nature of marketing strategies in the digital era and its implications for brands, marketers, yoga influencers, consumers, the academic or research community, marketing agencies and government bodies.
The aim of this chapter is to explore personal narratives and conversational stories of self-declared victims of abuse in the comments section of a knowledge-sharing platform, such as YouTube. The aim is to analyze the resemblance between the interaction and exchange of narratives in comments sections, on the one hand, and narrative group psychotherapy and self-help support groups, on the other. While previous research on storytelling mostly addresses professionally guided or produced narratives, this approach extends the production of these narratives to online communicative contexts. Firstly, the chapter looks at the theoretical tenets of storytelling. Secondly, a sociolinguistic, narratology-oriented approach is used to exemplify this practice. This part of the chapter discusses how the interaction among commentators and the exchange of personal narratives meet the core principles of self-help support groups and group psychotherapy.
International labor migration is increasingly facilitated by unofficial intermediaries who play a significant role within the diverse migration infrastructure. Growing uncertainty about the future caused by conflicts, economic crises, or pandemics has led migrants to increasingly seek employment through the Internet, where micro-influencers become active assistants, providing advice to those seeking work abroad. In recent years, Overseas Filipino Workers have become such active online intermediaries. Migrant vlogs have become an integral part of the multidimensional migration infrastructure, facilitating transnational labor intermediation and exposing issues related to navigating infrastructural dimensions for basic infrastructure users – migrants. The article aims to illustrate the multidimensionality of migration infrastructure through the example of the YouTube vlog. Despite attempts to liberalize migration management methods, such as through the possibility of seeking employment online, they have not led to the development of migrants’ migratory capacities. Nowadays, migrants – the basic infrastructure users – have to navigate through additional elements of infrastructure (vlogs) as well as face growing bureaucratization of the process itself, which should be considered an example of infrastructural involution (Xiang and Lindquist 2014). The paper presents the results of a qualitative content analysis of the comments posted under the video of a Filipina vlogger living in Poland, who provides advice on her YouTube channel to people interested in employment. The results illustrate the multidimensionality of migration infrastructure on the example of a vlog and prove the infrastructural involution resulting from the growing complexity of commentators’ needs.
See the full text at https://so04.tci-thaijo.org/index.php/LEARN/article/view/274081.
Lexical bundles and moves are essential for vloggers to communicate clearly and purposefully within travel vlog discourse. It is crucial for L2 learners and practitioners aiming to enter the industry to master these bundles and understand the moves used in creating travel vlogs. This corpus-based study compiled a list of 239 four-word lexical bundles serving as fixed slots and their 98 variable slots from the Travel Vlog Corpus, which comprises 434,809 running words. These bundles were categorised by function: 79 as stance expressions, 75 as discourse organisers, 80 as referential expressions, and 5 as special conversational functions. The study also identified four move types and their 19 component steps necessary for creating travel vlogs. It emphasised that lexical bundles and moves are critical knowledge with important functions for generating travel vlog discourse. The study concluded by proposing pedagogical implications and discussing future research directions.
Lesbians have long turned to digital media and technologies for information, support, and to self-represent sexual identity in ways that have the capacity for building communities and gathering publics and counterpublics. TikTok is a short video platform popular with young people, which has increasingly seen the participation of comparatively older users. This paper investigates the self-representation of lesbians over age 30 on TikTok to understand the themes in their content and how the platform shapes their communication with others. Through sampling tailored to TikTok's algorithmic curation, ten lesbians' accounts are examined alongside qualitative coding and analysis of 50 of these creators' videos. Findings reveal key themes regarding the expression of identity and age, lived experience over time, and bids for connection and community. TikTokers expressed lesbian identity in continuity with longstanding stereotypes to enhance visibility but also incorporated humor and youthful trends to give rise to novel identity expressions. Videos showcasing the passage of time and sociopolitical change demonstrated the resilience of lesbian lives and conveyed hope while advice and statements of solidarity expressed support for young people's present struggles with homophobia and transphobia. Contrasting with studies of TikTok's generational wars, this article shows how older lesbians are building generational bridges through their uptake of youth-driven platform practices, sharing of past challenges to support youth in overcoming present hurdles, and by modeling lesbian futures.
O presente trabalho busca analisar a expansão, popularização, o impacto econômico, e as tecnologias envolvidas dentro do conceito de criação de conteúdo digital conhecido como “VTuber” (abreviação do inglês de Virtual Youtuber), que são criadores de conteúdo que utilizam avatares virtuais criados em softwares de computação gráfica para criar conteúdo anonimamente. Este novo tipo de criação de conteúdo nasceu a partir da popularização de diversas tecnologias antes restritas como mapeamento facial, computação gráfica, arte digital etc. Este estudo busca analisar as origens desse fenômeno dentro de seu contexto cultural, quais tecnologias utiliza e como isso está impactando culturalmente e economicamente o meio digital e real.
Over the past decade, a robust body of scholarship on microcelebrity has emerged,
occasioning several review studies of this growing field of research. Extant reviews
on microcelebrity have mostly focused on microcelebrities’ strategic communication
or audiences’ attitudes, but no review has specifically focused on microcelebrities’
identity. Echoing the call for more attention to this particular aspect in recent
reviews, this article examines 97 empirical studies published from 2010 to 2022
that focused on microcelebrities’ identity construction on social media. Our analysis
identified various research trends and synthesized microcelebrities’ identity tactics
into 10 categories. We situate the findings within current discussions of platformized
cultural production and microcelebrity’s role in it by drawing on and extending
Duffy et al.’s ‘nested precarities’ framework to account for microcelebrities’ identity
work on social media. The review’s key contribution is the conceptualization
of microcelebrities’ identity-related tactics and its embedding in the formidable
precarities of platform ecosystems.
Despite the growing popularity and commercial potential of live streaming, research on live streaming trade is still in its early stages. Moreover, previous studies have produced inconsistent results regarding the influence of digital celebrity perceptions on consumer shopping intentions. Therefore, this study aims to investigate the antecedents of live-streaming shopping intentions by integrating the Perception of Digital Celebrities with the Uses and Gratifications theory. To achieve this objective, a quantitative approach was employed, and primary data were collected from 504 Indonesian consumers through the distribution of questionnaires. The collected data were analyzed using Structural Equation Modeling based on Partial Least Squares with the aid of SmartPLS 3. The findings of this study suggest that the Perception of Digital Celebrities has a significant effect on consumers’ live-streaming shopping intentions. Additionally, Social Interaction was found to have a significant effect on live-stream shopping intention, and Social Interaction was found to mediate the relationship between the Perception of Digital Celebrities and Live-Stream Shopping Intentions.
The publishing market has gone through deep transformations in the last few years, and the emergence of new media actors like BookTubers has increased the complexity of this system. The article proposes understanding BookTuber practices based on an interface-centered approach that goes beyond the conventional studies of the “graphic user interface”. In the framework employed in the article, the “interface” is considered to be the place where different actors relate to each other and the process between them are carried out. The article also presents a map of the BookTuber interface and its tensions. This interface-centered approach, a work-in-progress, could also be applied to other practices.
The concept of using celebrities to promote products or services has become a well-explored and widely adopted strategy in modern businesses. This essay aims to explore the influence of celebrity endorsements on customers' willingness to spend money, which is the central research inquiry. A qualitative approach is employed to examine this topic, utilizing an inductive research method. Secondary data from journals and online publications are collected to provide context for the study. However, it's important to note that customers' readiness to make purchases can vary due to factors like income and substitutes. It can be stated, however, that celebrity-endorsed items significantly affect consumers' decision to purchase. This study report use quantitative research methods to identify the variables that affect consumer purchasing behavior and celebrity endorsement. The review of previous research on celebrity endorsements sheds light on our research question and explains a number of key study-related facts. Our research study employs the quantitative approach to comprehend the perspectives of customer behavior, qualities, and how they interact with purchasing behavior. A questionnaire was used to gather the data, which was then analyzed using statistical package.
Ico Maly buigt zich over de vraag op welke manier Conner Rousseau de sociaaldemocratie nieuw leven inblaast. Hoe gebruikt hij digitale media en digitale cultuur om de beweging op te bouwen?
This article examines the social media-induced affective notion of fame from the perspective of people living in peripheries, such as the region of Northeast India, whom the mainstream media (and by extension, the popular imagination) have always obscured, or somewhat suppressed. When they come across these visibility-inducing social media platforms, does this lead to the creation of new forms of celebrityhood? This article observes three specific people from the region-a filmmaker, a small-time Bollywood actor, and an Instagram dancing sensation. The case studies outline their usage of the affordances of the social media platforms through which they acquire a kind of cultish fame. It examines how they leverage fame to instil the greater Northeast region in the popular national imagination. This article claims that social media is not merely a platform for these artists to connect with and maintain their audiences, but also a place to create awareness, to define their identity and reveal the socio-historical fractures that they have inherited. This article extends the notion of micro-celebrity (Senft, "Keeping It Real on the Web") to dwell on the relationship between media-managed obscurity and social media-enabled self-promotion to conceptualise the category of in-betweeners.
Much has been written on the ways in which the Internet benefits opposition movements, in particular in authoritarian regimes. And while some acknowledge that the Internet also provides opportunities for authoritarian governments as well, few have looked at the Internet and social media as a space for back-and-forth actions between the sides. In Azerbaijan, social media allows both the ruling regime and oppositionists to engage with each other and Azerbaijani citizens in new ways. Social media provides the regime with an alternative medium to harass the opposition and demonstrate its power to the citizenry. And while there is a social media presence, the traditional opposition parties do not leverage all affordances of it, however oppositionists not affiliated with traditional parties are leveraging social media to build audiences and engage in action. While the regime is currently "winning" the social media battle through the use of its resources, the new and creative ways that oppositionists are using social media for connective action could prove to be a successful means of dissent.
Celebrity has developed into a particularly powerful and pervasive trope for contemporary culture. It works at organising what we perceive as significant and this is made evident through its permeation of what constitutes news. Similarly, celebrity has been well documented in terms of its capacity to shape our entertainment: stardom is at least one of the cultural economies in which our stories and fictions are selected or read and recreated in popular culture. This article argues for the development of persona studies, where research on the celebrity is a subset of a wider study of how the self and public intersect and produce versions and identities that in some way continue to support the wider demands of our work economies.
The emergent new media ecology which integrates participatory media into the structure of global information flows has fundamentally affected the means of production and distribution of attention, a key resource for social movements. In social movement scholarship, attention itself is rarely examined directly; rather, it is encountered in the study of means of delivering attention such as mass media or celebrities. This conflation of the resource, attention, and the pathways to acquire it, such as mass media, was less of an analytic problem when mass media enjoyed a near monopoly on public attention. However, the paths connecting movement actors and public attention are increasingly multiplex and include civic and social media. In this article, I examine the concept of attention as a distinct analytic category, reevaluate social movement scholarship in light of weakening of the monopoly on public attention, and introduce and examine a novel dynamic brought about by emergent attention economy: networked microcelebrity activism. I examine this novel dynamic through case studies and raise questions for future exploration.
Reality television programming simultaneously narrates the conditions of the social factory and produces new forms of labour in and through them. This essay explores the nature of the labour performed by the shows' participants and argues that it involves the self-conscious development
and management of public persona based on templates of the self supplied by corporate media culture. This labour of self-presentation operates simultaneously as work for the television industry and as a form of image-entrepreneurship for the individual participants. Insofar as this form of
labour involves the alienation of embodied subjectivity into image commodities with recognizable market value, it constitutes a form of self-spectacularization. Reality television programming also provides templates for these spectacular selves within a distinct corporate culture, which aims
to contain and control individuals' virtuosity, thus incorporating identity. The Apprentice and Joe Schmo are explored as examples of reality shows that dramatize and embody the collapse of any meaningful distinction between notions of the self and capitalist processes of production.
This process of both narrating and producing a branded self enacted by the reality television might be seen as part of a broader multi-level marketing campaign we could call the corporate colonization of the real.
The "Idol" phenomenon is a spectacle founded on the creation, perpetuation, and maintenance of specific kinds of carefully structured consumer relationships. Several of the more successful contestants are gradually formed into recognizable and familiar brands centered on varied and mostly familiar pop star personae intended to form the foundations of the relationships between the various contestants and their supporters. However "Idol" relationships are not limited to familiar musician-fan binaries, but grow and evolve into a series of intimate, active relationships that stretch well beyond the life of the show. By the end of each series the primary relationship is no longer confined to contestants and fans, but includes a series of relationships between the program and its audience created through a wide range of channels. The main goal of "Idol's" producers is to build affective investment in contestants and gradually shift that investment to the narrative and drama of the program itself.
Social media technologies collapse multiple audiences into single contexts, making it difficult for people to use the same techniques online that they do to handle multiplicity in face-to-face conversation. This paper investigates how content producers navigate 'imagined audiences' on Twitter. We talked to participants with different types of followings to understand their techniques, including targeting multiple audiences, concealing subjects, and maintaining authenticity. For some, the techniques of audience management resemble those of 'micro-celebrity' and personal branding, representing strategic self-commodification. Our model of the networked audience assumes a many-to-many communication through which individuals conceptualize an imagined audience evoked through their tweets.
This article explores how the celebrity discourse of the self both presages and works as a pedagogical tool for the burgeoning world of presentational media and its users that is now an elemental part of new media culture. What is often understood as social media via social network sites is also a form of presentation of the self and produces this new hybrid among the personal, interpersonal and the mediated – what I am calling ‘presentational media’. Via Facebook, MySpace, Friendster and Twitter individuals engage in an expression of the self that, like the celebrity discourse of the self, is not entirely interpersonal in nature nor is it entirely highly mediated or representational. This middle ground of self-expression – again partially mediated and partially interpersonal (and theoretically drawing from Erving Goffman's work) – has produced an expansion of the intertextual zone that has been the bedrock of the celebrity industry for more than half a century and now is the very centre of the social media networks of the internet and mobile media. The article investigates this convergence of presentation of the self through a study of social network patterns of presentation of celebrities and the very overcoded similarity in the patterns of self-presentation of millions of users. It relates these forms of presentation to the longer discourse of the self that informed the production of celebrity for most of the last century.
Social media technologies let people connect by creating and sharing content. We examine the use of Twitter by famous people to conceptualize celebrity as a practice. On Twitter, celebrity is practiced through the appearance and performance of 'backstage' access. Celebrity practitioners reveal what appears to be personal information to create a sense of intimacy between participant and follower, publicly acknowledge fans, and use language and cultural references to create affiliations with followers. Interactions with other celebrity practitioners and personalities give the impression of candid, uncensored looks at the people behind the personas. But the indeterminate 'authenticity' of these performances appeals to some audiences, who enjoy the game playing intrinsic to gossip consumption. While celebrity practice is theoretically open to all, it is not an equalizer or democratizing discourse. Indeed, in order to successfully practice celebrity, fans must recognize the power differentials intrinsic to the relationship.
This study investigated impression management tactics and self-presentation on popular A-list blogs. Building on Goffman's constructs of self-presentation and operationalizing impression management strategies, this study content analyzed the most-linked-to blogs. A-list bloggers reveal more information about themselves than other bloggers and actively engage in impression management. Differences in blogs based on gender confirm traditional gendered online behavior. Findings indicate the diversity of blogs and encourage researchers to understand the pieces of blogs before purporting to understand the medium as a whole.
Being a celebrity sure ain’t what it used to be. Or, perhaps more accurately, the process of maintaining a stable star persona isn’t what it used to be. With the rise of new media technologies—including digital photography and video production, gossip blogging, social networking sites, and streaming video—there has been a rapid proliferation of voices which serve to articulate stars’ personae. This panoply of sanctioned and unsanctioned discourses has brought the coherence and stability of the star’s image into crisis, with an evermore-heightened loop forming recursively between celebrity gossip and scandals, on the one hand, and, on the other, new media-enabled speculation and commentary about these scandals and gossip-pieces. Of course, while no subject has a single meaning, Hollywood has historically expended great energy and resources to perpetuate the myth that the star’s image is univocal. In the present moment, however, studios’s traditional methods for discursive control have faltered, such that celebrities have found it necessary to take matters into their own hands, using new media technologies, particularly Twitter, in an attempt to stabilise that most vital currency of their trade, their professional/public persona. In order to fully appreciate the significance of this new mode of publicity management, and its larger implications for contemporary subjectivity writ large, we must first come to understand the history of Hollywood’s approach to celebrity publicity and image management.A Brief History of Hollywood PublicityThe origins of this effort are nearly as old as Hollywood itself, for, as Richard DeCordova explains, the celebrity scandals of the 1920s threatened to disrupt the economic vitality of the incipient industry such that strict, centralised image control appeared as a necessary imperative to maintain a consistently reliable product. The Fatty Arbuckle murder trial was scandalous not only for its subject matter (a murder suffused with illicit and shadowy sexual innuendo) but also because the event revealed that stars, despite their mediated larger-than-life images, were not only as human as the rest of us, but that, in fact, they were capable of profoundly inhuman acts. The scandal, then, was not so much Arbuckle’s crime, but the negative pall it cast over the Hollywood mythos of glamour and grace. The studios quickly organised an industry-wide regulatory agency (the MPPDA) to counter potentially damaging rhetoric and ward off government intervention. Censorship codes and morality clauses were combined with well-funded publicity departments in an effort that successfully shifted the locus of the star’s extra-filmic discursive construction from private acts—which could betray their screen image—to information which served to extend and enhance the star’s pre-existing persona. In this way, the sanctioned celebrity knowledge sphere became co-extensive with that of commercial culture itself; the star became meaningful only by knowing how she spent her leisure time and the type of make-up she used. The star’s identity was not found via unsanctioned intrusion, but through studio-sanctioned disclosure, made available in the form of gossip columns, newsreels, and fan magazines. This period of relative stability for the star's star image was ultimately quite brief, however, as the collapse of the studio system in the late 1940s and the introduction of television brought about a radical, but gradual, reordering of the star's signifying potential. The studios no longer had the resources or incentive to tightly police star images—the classic age of stardom was over. During this period of change, an influx of alternative voices and publications filled the discursive void left by the demise of the studios’s regimented publicity efforts, with many of these new outlets reengaging older methods of intrusion to generate a regular rhythm of vendible information about the stars.The first to exploit and capitalize on star image instability was Robert Harrison, whose Confidential Magazine became the leading gossip publication of the 1950s. Unlike its fan magazine rivals, which persisted in portraying the stars as morally upright and wholesome, Confidential pledged on the cover of each issue to “tell the facts and name the names,” revealing what had been theretofore “confidential.” In essence, through intrusion, Confidential reasserted scandal as the true core of the star, simultaneously instituting incursion and surveillance as the most direct avenue to the “kernel” of the celebrity subject, obtaining stories through associations with call girls, out-of-work starlettes, and private eyes. As extra-textual discourses proliferated and fragmented, the contexts in which the public encountered the star changed as well. Theatre attendance dropped dramatically, and as the studios sold their film libraries to television, the stars, formerly available only on the big screen and in glamour shots, were now intercut with commercials, broadcast on grainy sets in the domestic space. The integrity—or at least the illusion of integrity—of the star image was forever compromised. As the parameters of renown continued to expand, film stars, formally distinguished from all other performers, migrated to television. The landscape of stardom was re-contoured into the “celebrity sphere,” a space that includes television hosts, musicians, royals, and charismatic politicians. The revamped celebrity “game” was complex, but still playabout: with a powerful agent, a talented publicist, and a check on drinking, drug use, and extra-marital affairs, a star and his or her management team could negotiate a coherent image. Confidential was gone, The National Inquirer was muzzled by libel laws, and People and E.T.—both sheltered within larger media companies—towed the publicists’s line. There were few widely circulated outlets through which unauthorised voices could gain traction. Old-School Stars and New Media Technologies: The Case of Tom CruiseYet with the relentless arrival of various news media technologies beginning in the 1980s and continuing through the present, maintaining tight celebrity image control began to require the services of a phalanx of publicists and handlers. Here, the example of Tom Cruise is instructive: for nearly twenty years, Cruise’s publicity was managed by Pat Kingsley, who exercised exacting control over the star’s image. With the help of seemingly diverse yet essentially similar starring roles, Cruise solidified his image as the cocky, charismatic boy-next-door.The unified Cruise image was made possible by shutting down competing discourses through the relentless, comprehensive efforts of his management company; Kingsley's staff fine-tuned Cruise’s acts of disclosure while simultaneously eliminating the potential for unplanned intrusions, neutralising any potential scandal at its source. Kingsley and her aides performed for Cruise all the functions of a studio publicity department from Hollywood’s Golden Age. Most importantly, Cruise was kept silent on the topic of his controversial religion, Scientology, lest it incite domestic and international backlash. In interviews and off-the-cuff soundbites, Cruise was ostensibly disclosing his true self, and that self remained the dominant reading of what, and who, Cruise “was.” Yet in 2004, Cruise fired Kingsley, replaced her with his own sister (and fellow Scientologist), who had no prior experience in public relations. In essence, he exchanged a handler who understood how to shape star disclosure for one who did not. The events that followed have been widely rehearsed: Cruise avidly pursued Katie Holmes; Cruise jumped for joy on Oprah’s couch; Cruise denounced psychology during a heated debate with Matt Lauer on The Today Show. His attempt at disclosing this new, un-publicist-mediated self became scandalous in and of itself. Cruise’s dismissal of Kingsley, his unpopular (but not necessarily unwelcome) disclosures, and his own massively unchecked ego all played crucial roles in the fall of the Cruise image. While these stumbles might have caused some minor career turmoil in the past, the hyper-echoic, spastically recombinatory logic of the technoculture brought the speed and stakes of these missteps to a new level; one of the hallmarks of the postmodern condition has been not merely an increasing textual self-reflexivity, but a qualitative new leap forward in inter-textual reflexivity, as well (Lyotard; Baudrillard). Indeed, the swift dismantling of Cruise’s long-established image is directly linked to the immediacy and speed of the Internet, digital photography, and the gossip blog, as the reflexivity of new media rendered the safe division between disclosure and intrusion untenable. His couchjumping was turned into a dance remix and circulated on YouTube; Mission Impossible 3 boycotts were organised through a number of different Web forums; gossip bloggers speculated that Cruise had impregnated Holmes using the frozen sperm of Scientology founder L. Ron Hubbard. In the past, Cruise simply filed defamation suits against print publications that would deign to sully his image. Yet the sheer number of sites and voices reproducing this new set of rumors made such a strategy untenable. Ultimately, intrusions into Cruise’s personal life, including the leak of videos intended solely for Scientology recruitment use, had far more traction than any sanctioned Cruise soundbite. Cruise’s image emerged as a hollowed husk of its former self; the sheer amount of material circulating rendered all attempts at P.R., including a Vanity Fair cover story and “reveal” of daughter Suri, ridiculous. His image was fragmented and re-collected into an altered, almost uncanny new iteration. Following the lackluster performance of Mission Impossible 3 and public condemnation by Paramount head Sumner Redstone, Cruise seemed almost pitiable. The New Logic of Celebrity Image ManagementCruise’s travails are expressive of a deeper development which has occurred over the course of the last decade, as the massively proliferating new forms of celebrity discourse (e.g., paparazzi photos, mug shots, cell phone video have further decentered any shiny, polished version of a star. With older forms of media increasingly reorganising themselves according to the aesthetics and logic of new media forms (e.g., CNN featuring regular segments in which it focuses its network cameras upon a computer screen displaying the CNN website), we are only more prone to appreciate “low media” forms of star discourse—reports from fans on discussion boards, photos taken on cell phones—as valid components of the celebrity image. People and E.T. still attract millions, but they are rapidly ceding control of the celebrity industry to their ugly, offensive stepbrothers: TMZ, Us Weekly, and dozens of gossip blogs. Importantly, a publicist may be able to induce a blogger to cover their client, but they cannot convince him to drop a story: if TMZ doesn’t post it, then Perez Hilton certainly will. With TMZ unabashedly offering pay-outs to informants—including those in law enforcement and health care, despite recently passed legislation—a star is never safe. If he or she misbehaves, someone, professional or amateur, will provide coverage. Scandal becomes normalised, and, in so doing, can no longer really function as scandal as such; in an age of around-the-clock news cycles and celebrity-fixated journalism, the only truly scandalising event would be the complete absence of any scandalous reports. Or, as aesthetic theorist Jacques Ranciere puts it; “The complaint is then no longer that images conceal secrets which are no longer such to anyone, but, on the contrary, that they no longer hide anything” (22).These seemingly paradoxical involutions of post-modern celebrity epistemologies are at the core of the current crisis of celebrity, and, subsequently, of celebrities’s attempts to “take back their own paparazzi.” As one might expect, contemporary celebrities have attempted to counter these new logics and strategies of intrusion through a heightened commitment to disclosure, principally through the social networking capabilities of Twitter. Yet, as we will see, not only have the epistemological reorderings of postmodernist technoculture affected the logic of scandal/intrusion, but so too have they radically altered the workings of intrusion’s dialectical counterpart, disclosure.In the 1930s, when written letters were still the primary medium for intimate communication, stars would send lengthy “hand-written” letters to members of their fan club. Of course, such letters were generally not written by the stars themselves, but handwriting—and a star’s signature—signified authenticity. This ritualised process conferred an “aura” of authenticity upon the object of exchange precisely because of its static, recurring nature—exchange of fan mail was conventionally understood to be the primary medium for personal encounters with a celebrity. Within the overall political economy of the studio system, the medium of the hand-written letter functioned to unleash the productive power of authenticity, offering an illusion of communion which, in fact, served to underscore the gulf between the celebrity’s extraordinary nature and the ordinary lives of those who wrote to them. Yet the criterion and conventions through which celebrity personae were maintained were subject to change over time, as new communications technologies, new modes of Hollywood's industrial organization, and the changing realities of commercial media structures all combined to create a constantly moving ground upon which the celebrity tried to affix. The celebrity’s changing conditions are not unique to them alone; rather, they are a highly visible bellwether of changes which are more fundamentally occurring at all levels of culture and subjectivity. Indeed, more than seventy years ago, Walter Benjamin observed that when hand-made expressions of individuality were superseded by mechanical methods of production, aesthetic criteria (among other things) also underwent change, rendering notions of authenticity increasingly indeterminate.Such is the case that in today’s world, hand-written letters seem more contrived or disingenuous than Danny DeVito’s inaugural post to his Twitter account: “I just joined Twitter! I don't really get this site or how it works. My nuts are on fire.” The performative gesture in DeVito’s tweet is eminently clear, just as the semantic value is patently false: clearly DeVito understands “this site,” as he has successfully used it to extend his irreverent funny-little-man persona to the new medium. While the truth claims of his Tweet may be false, its functional purpose—both effacing and reifying the extraordinary/ordinary distinction of celebrity and maintaining DeVito’s celebrity personality as one with which people might identify—is nevertheless seemingly intact, and thus mirrors the instrumental value of celebrity disclosure as performed in older media forms. Twitter and Contemporary TechnocultureFor these reasons and more, considered within the larger context of contemporary popular culture, celebrity tweeting has been equated with the assertion of the authentic celebrity voice; celebrity tweets are regularly cited in newspaper articles and blogs as “official” statements from the celebrity him/herself. With so many mediated voices attempting to “speak” the meaning of the star, the Twitter account emerges as the privileged channel to the star him/herself. Yet the seemingly easy discursive associations of Twitter and authenticity are in fact ideological acts par excellence, as fixations on the indexical truth-value of Twitter are not merely missing the point, but actively distracting from the real issues surrounding the unsteady discursive construction of contemporary celebrity and the “celebretification” of contemporary subjectivity writ large. In other words, while it is taken as axiomatic that the “message” of celebrity Twittering is, as Henry Jenkins suggests, “Here I Am,” this outward epistemological certainty veils the deeply unstable nature of celebrity—and by extension, subjectivity itself—in our networked society.If we understand the relationship between publicity and technoculture to work as Zizek-inspired cultural theorist Jodi Dean suggests, then technologies “believe for us, accessing information even if we cannot” (40), such that technology itself is enlisted to serve the function of ideology, the process by which a culture naturalises itself and attempts to render the notion of totality coherent. For Dean, the psycho-ideological reality of contemporary culture is predicated upon the notion of an ever-elusive “secret,” which promises to reveal us all as part of a unitary public. The reality—that there is no such cohesive collective body—is obscured in the secret’s mystifying function which renders as “a contingent gap what is really the fact of the fundamental split, antagonism, and rupture of politics” (40). Under the ascendancy of the technoculture—Dean's term for the technologically mediated landscape of contemporary communicative capitalism—subjectivity becomes interpellated along an axis blind to the secret of this fundamental rupture. The two interwoven poles of this axis are not unlike structuralist film critics' dialectically intertwined accounts of the scopophilia and scopophobia of viewing relations, simply enlarged from the limited realm of the gaze to encompass the entire range of subjectivity. As such, the conspiratorial mindset is that mode of desire, of lack, which attempts to attain the “secret,” while the celebrity subject is that element of excess without which desire is unthinkable. As one might expect, the paparazzi and gossip sites’s strategies of intrusion have historically operated primarily through the conspiratorial mindset, with endless conjecture about what is “really happening” behind the scenes. Under the intrusive/conspiratorial paradigm, the authentic celebrity subject is always just out of reach—a chance sighting only serves to reinscribe the need for the next encounter where, it is believed, all will become known. Under such conditions, the conspiratorial mindset of the paparazzi is put into overdrive: because the star can never be “fully” known, there can never be enough information about a star, therefore, more information is always needed. Against this relentless intrusion, the celebrity—whose discursive stability, given the constant imperative for newness in commercial culture, is always in danger—risks a semiotic liquidation that will totally displace his celebrity status as such. Disclosure, e.g. Tweeting, emerges as a possible corrective to the endlessly associative logic of the paparazzi’s conspiratorial indset. In other words, through Twitter, the celebrity seeks to arrest meaning—fixing it in place around their own seemingly coherent narrativisation. The publicist’s new task, then, is to convincingly counter such unsanctioned, intrusive, surveillance-based discourse. Stars continue to give interviews, of course, and many regularly pose as “authors” of their own homepages and blogs. Yet as posited above, Twitter has emerged as the most salient means of generating “authentic” celebrity disclosure, simultaneously countering the efforts of the papparazzi, fan mags, and gossip blogs to complicate or rewrite the meaning of the star. The star uses the account—verified, by Twitter, as the “real” star—both as a means to disclose their true interior state of being and to counter erastz narratives circulating about them. Twitter’s appeal for both celebrities and their followers comes from the ostensible spontaneity of the tweets, as the seemingly unrehearsed quality of the communiqués lends the form an immediacy and casualness unmatched by blogs or official websites; the semantic informality typically employed in the medium obscures their larger professional significance for celebrity tweeters. While Twitter’s air of extemporary intimacy is also offered by other social networking platforms, such as MySpace or Facebook, the latter’s opportunities for public feedback (via wall-posts and the like) works counter to the tight image control offered by Twitter’s broadcast-esque model. Additionally, because of the uncertain nature of the tweet release cycle—has Ashton Kutcher sent a new tweet yet?—the voyeuristic nature of the tweet disclosure (with its real-time nature offering a level of synchronic intimacy that letters never could have matched), and the semantically displaced nature of the medium, it is a form of disclosure perfectly attuned to the conspiratorial mindset of the technoculture. As mentioned above, however, the conspiratorial mindset is an unstable subjectivity, insofar as it only exists through a constant oscillation with its twin, the celebrity subjectivity. While we can understand that, for the celebrities, Twitter functions by allowing them a mode for disclosive/celebrity subjectivisation, we have not yet seen how the celebrity itself is rendered conspiratorial through Twitter. Similarly, only the conspiratorial mode of the follower’s subjectivity has thus far been enumerated; the moment of the follower's celebrtification has so far gone unmentioned. Since we have seen that the celebrity function of Twitter is not really about discourse per se, we should instead understand that the ideological value of Twitter comes from the act of tweeting itself, of finding pleasure in being engaged in a techno-social system in which one's participation is recognised. Recognition and participation should be qualified, though, as it is not the fully active type of participation one might expect in say, the electoral politics of a representative democracy. Instead, it is a participation in a sort of epistemological viewing relations, or, as Jodi Dean describes it, “that we understand ourselves as known is what makes us think there is that there is a public that knows us” (122). The fans’ recognition by the celebrity—the way in which they understood themselves as known by the star was once the receipt of a hand-signed letter (and a latent expectation that the celebrity had read the fan’s initial letter); such an exchange conferred to the fan a momentary sense of participation in the celebrity's extraordinary aura. Under Twitter, however, such an exchange does not occur, as that feeling of one-to-one interaction is absent; simply by looking elsewhere on the screen, one can confirm that a celebrity's tweet was received by two million other individuals. The closest a fan can come to that older modality of recognition is by sending a message to the celebrity that the celebrity then “re-tweets” to his broader following. Beyond the obvious levels of technological estrangement involved in such recognition is the fact that the identity of the re-tweeted fan will not be known by the celebrity’s other two million followers. That sense of sharing in the celebrity’s extraordinary aura is altered by an awareness that the very act of recognition largely entails performing one’s relative anonymity in front of the other wholly anonymous followers. As the associative, conspiratorial mindset of the star endlessly searches for fodder through which to maintain its image, fans allow what was previously a personal moment of recognition to be transformed into a public one. That is, the conditions through which one realises one’s personal subjectivity are, in fact, themselves becoming remade according to the logic of celebrity, in which priority is given to the simple fact of visibility over that of the actual object made visible. Against such an opaque cultural transformation, the recent rise of reactionary libertarianism and anti-collectivist sentiment is hardly surprising. ReferencesBaudrillard, Jean. Simulacra and Simulation. Ann Arbor: Michigan UP, 1994.Benjamin, Walter. Illuminations. New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1968. Dean, Jodi. Publicity’s Secret: How Technoculture Capitalizes on Democracy. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 2003. DeCordova, Richard. Picture Personalities: The Emergence of the Star System in America. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1990. Jenkins, Henry. “The Message of Twitter: ‘Here It Is’ and ‘Here I Am.’” Confessions of an Aca-Fan. 23 Aug. 2009. 15 Sep. 2009 < http://henryjenkins.org/2009/08/the_message_of_twitter.html >.Lyotard, Jean-Francois. The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge. Minneapolis: Minnesota UP, 1984.Ranciere, Jacques. The Future of the Image. New York: Verso, 2007.
With the industrialisation of publishing in the late nineteenth century, “writing” wrote Innis “becomes a device for advertising advertising:”1 Most immediately, the great Canadian media historian was thinking of newspapers, circulation wars, and the role of Hearst-type journalism in promoting ads for industrialism’s new consumer goods. But he also had in mind the growth of the publishing industry’s own promotional needs, by virtue of which even serious and seemingly autonomous forms of writing became deeply tangled up in the advertising function as well. Hence the enhanced “importance of names” a marked tendency in all corners of the literary market towards topicality, faddism, and sensation.
Is reality TV a coherent genre? This book addresses this question by examining the characteristics, contexts and breadth of reality TV through a history of its programming trends. Paying attention to stylistic connections as well as key concepts, this study breaks reality television down into three main 'generations': the camcorder generation, the competition generation and the celebrity generation. Beginning with a consideration of the applicability of the term 'genre' for this televisual hybrid, the book takes a transnational approach to investigating the forms and formats of reality TV framed by relevant popular and critical discourses. Key Questions. • What formal characteristics broadly define reality TV? • Can reality TV be considered a genre when it relies so heavily on mixing together elements of established television genres, film practices and even industries unrelated to television, such as pop music and modelling? • How can the genealogy of reality TV programming trends help us to understand the cultural discourses and concepts with which reality TV is associated for example surveillance, performance, voyeurism, celebrity and even reality itself?.
This book is a critical and ethnographic study of camgirls: women who broadcast themselves over the web for the general public while trying to cultivate a measure of celebrity in the process. The books over-arching question is, What does it mean for feminists to speak about the personal as political in a networked society that encourages women to represent through confession, celebrity, and sexual display, but punishes too much visibility with conservative censure and backlash? The narrative follows that of the camgirl phenomenon, beginning with the earliest experiments in personal homecamming and ending with the newest forms of identity and community being articulated through social networking sites like Live Journal, YouTube, MySpace, and Facebook. It is grounded in interviews, performance analysis of events transpiring between camgirls and their viewers, and the authors own experiences as an ersatz camgirl while conducting the research. Published (author's copy) Peer Reviewed
Social media technologies such as YouTube, Twitter, and Facebook promised a new participatory online culture. Yet, technology insider Alice Marwick contends in this insightful book, "Web 2.0" only encouraged a preoccupation with status and attention. Her original research-which includes conversations with entrepreneurs, Internet celebrities, and Silicon Valley journalists-explores the culture and ideology of San Francisco's tech community in the period between the dot com boom and the App store, when the city was the world's center of social media development.Marwick argues that early revolutionary goals have failed to materialize: while many continue to view social media as democratic, these technologies instead turn users into marketers and self-promoters, and leave technology companies poised to violate privacy and to prioritize profits over participation. Marwick analyzes status-building techniques-such as self-branding, micro-celebrity, and life-streaming-to show that Web 2.0 did not provide a cultural revolution, but only furthered inequality and einforced traditional social stratification, demarcated by race, class, and gender.
The popular photo-sharing app Instagram has created a new breed of celebrities: the Instafamous. This essay examines the phenomenon—from Singaporean socialites showing off shoe collections to high school sophomores with ten thousand followers—and its relationship to celebrity and tabloid culture.
We are entering an economy based not on information, but on image. The result is a phantasmagoric capitalism in which labor performers gain value on markets through their work of self-presentation. After tracing the evolution of labor performance through the romantic and modernist styles, this article contends that performers now intentionally compose their persona for the market, and do so through methods learned from the celebrity world. The language of iconography, the discipline that investigates the meanings of images, reveals the methods through which persona is composed, these being personification, attribute and allegory. By contrast to literature on the postmodern self, the article concludes that this phantasmagoric style of self-presentation does not entail a fracturing of self. Rather, aspirants to economic success must have a stronger and more determined sense of self than ever before, since they must strategically adapt persona to meet market demand.
In recent debates about the ever-growing prominence of celebrity in society and culture, a number of scholars have started to use the often intermingled terms ‘celebrification’ and ‘celebritization’. This article contributes to these debates first by distinguishing and clearly defining both terms, and especially by presenting a multidimensional conceptual model of celebritization to remedy the current one-sided approaches that obscure its theoretical and empirical complexity. Here ‘celebrification’ captures the transformation of ordinary people and public figures into celebrities, whereas ‘celebritization’ is conceptualized as a meta-process that grasps the changing nature, as well as the societal and cultural embedding of celebrity, which can be observed through its democratization, diversification and migration. It is argued that these manifestations of celebritization are driven by three separate but interacting moulding forces: mediatization, personalization and commodification.
In Understanding Celebrity, I coined the term ‘the demotic turn’ as a means of characterizing the increasing production of ‘ordinary’ celebrities through reality TV and DIY celebrity websites. Refusing the idea that this necessarily constituted a democratizing process - hence the term ‘demotic’ - I wanted to examine the role that the access to mass-mediated fame plays within the construction of cultural identities. In this article, I develop this idea a little further by asking whether the shrinking distance between TV and ‘reality’, and between the famous and the ‘ordinary’, means that we need to reconsider our understandings of what kind of cultural apparatus the media has become.
Twitter is a linguistic marketplace (Bourdieu, 1977) in which the processes of self-branding and micro-celebrity (Marwick, 2010) depend on visibility as a means of increasing social and economic gain. Hashtags are a potent resource within this system for promoting the visibility of a Twitter update (and, by implication, the update’s author). This study analyses the frequency, types and grammatical context of hashtags which occurred in a dataset of approximately 92,000 tweets, taken from 100 publically available Twitter accounts, comparing the discourse styles of corporations, celebrity practitioners and ‘ordinary’ Twitter members. The results suggest that practices of self-branding and micro-celebrity operate on a continuum which reflects and reinforces the social and economic hierarchies which exist in offline contexts. Despite claims that hashtags are ‘conversational’, this study suggests that participatory culture in Twitter is not evenly distributed, and that the discourse of celebrity practitioners and corporations exhibits the synthetic personalization (Fairclough, 1989) typical of mainstream media forms of broadcast talk.
This article examines two internet websites — Nerve, a magazine devoted to `smart smut', and SuicideGirls, an `altporn' site where softcore sexual display is a major component of a participatory taste culture. Through a consideration of the ways such sites present their commercial and community elements as part of a shared taste and aesthetic, the article investigates how some new forms of pornography are developing to construct sexual display as a form of recreation, self-presentation and community building.
This article reviews the social potential of digital storytelling, and in particular its potential to contribute to the strengthening of democracy. Through answering this question, it seeks to test out the relative strengths and weaknesses of two competing concepts for grasping the wider consequences of media for the social world: the concept of mediatization and the concept of mediation. It is argued that mediatization (developed, for example, by Stig Hjarvard and Winfried Schulz) is stronger at addressing aspects of media textuality, suggesting that a unitary media-based logic is at work. In spite of its apparent vagueness, mediation (developed in particular by Roger Silverstone) provides more flexibility for thinking about the open-ended and dialectical social transformations which, as with the printed book, may come in time to be articulated with the new form of digital storytelling.
This article considers how fans of Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel interpret the character of Spike through meanings attached to actor James Marsters as a ‘subcultural celebrity’. Work on TV’s celebrity actors has stressed how character and actor can become semiotically blurred. Rather than approaching this blurring of textual and extra-textual connotations as an essential property of television celebrity, we analyse how Marsters displays situated agency by discursively constructing ‘himself’ in publicity materials as ‘like Spike’. We then consider Marsters as a reader of Buffy. As a subcultural celebrity, we argue that Marsters is positioned between media producers and media fans, and therefore is able to offer up privileged interpretations of ‘his’ character, Spike, while simultaneously observing the symbolic power of producers’ preferred readings. Marsters supports certain fan readings of Spike, acting as a textual poacher who nevertheless is ‘inside’ the texts of Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel.
In this article we argue that “citizen journalist” debates surrounding weblogs, or “blogs”, have tended to displace attention from the ways in which specific media professionals (e.g. those working on television drama) have used blogging as a promotional tool. Rather than challenging forms of media power, we suggest that this blogging actually reinforces the cultural and symbolic power of media producers, positioned as knowledgeable “insiders”, versus fans strictly defined as “consumers”. Our particular focus is on cult television media professionals who can be thought of as “subcultural celebrities”. We contrast two different approaches to subcultural celebrity blogging, which we term “official” and “unofficial”, considering how these differential registers of formality/informality and strict gatekeeping/apparent accessibility both work to reify cultural differences and inequalities between subcultural celebrities and their fans. Rather than enabling confessions from behind-the-scenes of television production, these blogs remain significantly restricted in their confessional form. Our analysis suggests that professional identities are conserved and protected, meaning that any information that could potentially damage television brands or careers is kept firmly off-stage, either through controlled interaction with fans via an “official” blog, or via the less formal cultivation of codes of privacy/professionalism in “unofficial” blogs.
This article analyzed 124 blogs, chronological, journal-type entries published on public hosting Web sites, as new and popular places for adolescents and emerging adults aged 15 to 19 to play openly with their self-presentation, an important aspect of identity exploration. Findings indicate that most young persons write emotionally toned entries; focus on their daily activities, friends, and romantic relationships; and describe themselves, but less frequently their experiences, positively. Bloggers often alter content and appearance of their Web pages, most commonly with photographs of themselves. Number of friends ranges widely, and most blog entries receive no or one comment, most of which are supportive. The article also describes and discusses gender and age differences and concludes that blogs written by adolescents and young emerging adults are less about direct interaction with others than about careful self-presentation.
We are entering an economy based not on information, but on image. The result is a phantasmagoric capitalism in which labor performers gain value on markets through their work of self-presentation. After tracing the evolution of labor performance through the romantic and modernist styles, this article contends that performers now intentionally compose their persona for the market, and do so through methods learned from the celebrity world. The language of iconography, the discipline that investigates the meanings of images, reveals the methods through which persona is composed, these being personification, attribute and allegory. By contrast to literature on the postmodern self, the article concludes that this phantasmagoric style of self-presentation does not entail a fracturing of self. Rather, aspirants to economic success must have a stronger and more determined sense of self than ever before, since they must strategically adapt persona to meet market demand.
Considerable political and media attention has focused on the phenomenon of the ‘celebrity politician’. As this article illustrates, there are two main variants of the phenomenon. The first is the elected politician or candidate who uses elements of ‘celebrityhood’ to establish their claim to represent a group or cause. The second is the celebrity—the star of popular culture—who uses their popularity to speak for popular opinion. Both examples have been seen by critics to debase liberal democratic political representation. This article challenges this critique and argues that the celebrity politician is consistent with a coherent account of political representation. This does not mean that all examples of the celebrity politician are to be seen as legitimate, but that the representative claim has to be analysed more carefully and discriminatingly than the critics typically suppose.
In this essay I observe that, as the field of celebrity studies established itself in the academy, there is a need for a distinctly
sociological and interactional approach to celebrity. In particular, I argue for a focus on the experiential and relational
dynamics of celebrity from the point of view of celebrities themselves, something which has so far been difficult for researchers
to achieve. One way to accomplish this goal is to move in the direction celebrity itself seems to be headed: toward local
or subcultural celebrities and their smaller, more segmented audiences. Empirical research on the lived experiences of local
celebrities provides a practical way to generate celebrity-level data and makes an important sociological contribution to
broader theorizing about the cultural phenomenon of celebrity.
KeywordsCelebrity-Sociology-Interaction-Local-Subcultural
This article proposes a general model to analyze and compare different uses of the blog format. Based on ideas from sociological structuration theory, as well as on existing blog research, it argues that individual usage episodes are framed by three structural dimensions of rules, relations, and code, which in turn are constantly (re)produced in social action. As a result, “communities of blogging practices” emerge-that is, groups of people who share certain routines and expectations about the use of blogs as a tool for information, identity, and relationship management. This analytical framework can be the basis for systematic comparative and longitudinal studies that will further understanding of similarities and differences in blogging practices.
If the Web and the Net can be viewed as spaces in which we will increasingly live our lives, the economic laws we will live under have to be natural to this new space. These laws turn out to be quite different from what the old economics teaches, or what rubrics such as "the information age" suggest. What counts most is what is most scarce now, namely attention. The attention economy brings with it its own kind of wealth, its own class divisions - stars vs. fans - and its own forms of property, all of which make it incompatible with the industrial-money-market based economy it bids fair to replace. Success will come to those who best accommodate to this new reality.
Business celebrities such as Bill Gates, Richard Branson and Rupert Murdoch are among the most widely recognised, admired and sometimes even vilified individuals in the world. Like their celebrity peers from the entertainment, sports, arts and political worlds, business celebrities exert an influence that is pervasive, but difficult to assess, evaluate and explain. Business celebrities have been around for as long as big business itself, but this is the first book to provide a systematic exploration of how they are constructed and why they exist. Business celebrities include entrepreneurs, CEOs, and management gurus. The book argues that these individuals are not self-made, but rather are created by a process of widespread media exposure to the point that their actions, personalities and even private lives function symbolically to represent significant dynamics and tensions prevalent in the contemporary business environment. Demystifying Business Celebrity raises questions about the impact and significance of the production of celebrity upon our understanding of, and our ability to promote the practice of leadership in an enlightened manner. The book will prove a useful addition to the enlightened business student's bookshelf and will be informative reading for all those with an interest in business and management. © 2009 Eric Guthey, Timothy Clark and Brad Jackson. All rights reserved.
In contemporary society, the cult of celebrity is inescapable. Anyone can be turned into a celebrity, and anything can be made into a celebrity event. Celebrity has become a part of everyday life, a common reference point. But how have people like Elvis Presley, John Lennon, Bill Clinton or Princess Diana impressed themselves so powerfully on the public mind? Do they have unique qualities, or have their images been constructed by the media? And what of the dark side of celebrity â why is the hunger to be in the public eye so great that people are prepared to go to any lengths to achieve it, as numerous mass murderers and serial killers have done. Chris Rojek brings together celebrated figures from the arts, sports, politics and other public spheres, from O.J. Simpson and Marilyn Monroe to Hitler and David Bowie, and touches on many movements and fads, including punk, rock-and-roll and fashion. Rojek analyzes the difference between ascribed celebrity, which derives from bloodline, and achieved celebrity, which follows on from personal achievement - the difference between Princess Margaret and, say, Woody Allen. He also shows how there is no parallel in history to today's ubiquitous "living" form of celebrity, powered by newspapers, PR departments, magazines and electronic mass media.
‘Graeme Turner is one of the leading figures in cultural studies today. When his gaze turns to celebrity, the result is a readable and compelling account of this most perplexing and infuriating of modern phenomena. Read on!’ – Toby Miller, New York University We cannot escape celebrity culture: it is everywhere. So just what is the cultural function of celebrity? This is the first comprehensive overview of the production and consumption of celebrity from within cultural and media studies. The pervasive influence of contemporary celebrity, and the cultures it produces, has been widely noticed. Earlier studies, though, have tended to focus on the consumption of celebrity or on particular locations of celebrity – Hollywood, or the sports industries for instance. This book presents a broad survey across all media as well as a new synthesis of theoretical positions, that will be welcomed by all students of media and cultural studies. Among its attributes are the following: It provides an overview and evaluation of the key debates surrounding the definition of celebrity, its history, and its social and cultural function; It examines the ‘celebrity industries’: the PR and publicity structures that manufacture celebrity; It looks at the cultural processes through which celebrity is consumed; It draws examples from the full range of contemporary media – film, television, newspapers, magazines and the web.
<http://www.frank151.com/news/digital-divas-molly-soda-interview.html#.Uu5BFbRu5es> (accessed Apr. 2015)
- Lina Abascal
<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ntdDoFiczXU&feature=youtube_gdata_player> (accessed Apr. 2015)
- Colleen Ballinger
“The unwatched life is not worth living: the elevation of the ordinary in celebrity culture.”
- Gamson
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- Alicia Eler
- Kate Durbin
Understanding Media: Inside Celebrity
- Jessica Evans
In the Limelight and under the Microscope: Forms and Functions of Female Celebrity
- Kim Allen