Twenty-First Century Celebrity

David C. Giles

• Publisher: Emerald Publishing Limited
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781787439658
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Media Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

Over the first two decades of the 21st century, celebrity has undergone significant changes as mass media have shifted from a restricted broadcast model to a digital free-for-all. Existing celebrities have been forced to adapt their style of presentation to suit a more interactive environment where fans expect continuous access, while the emergent social media have generated new forms of celebrity that reflect the unique affordances of YouTube, Instagram and other platforms.
In this book, David Giles argues that these developments are best understood by rethinking traditional concepts of media and audience in order to explain how a platform like YouTube has evolved its own media culture that affords a different type of celebrity to those associated with cinema, radio and television. Above all else, the 21st century celebrity is valued more for their (apparent) authenticity than for their glamour or talents, and Giles examines how that authenticity is a carefully crafted performance. Drawing extensively on the burgeoning celebrity studies literature, he explores the impact of digital culture on earlier concepts like parasocial relationships and celetoids as well as critiquing more recent ideas such as microcelebrity.

PART I

CELEBRITY IN THEORY AND RESEARCH

1

CELEBRITY STUDIES AND THE CHANGING MEDIA LANDSCAPE

“There was no such thing as celebrity prior to the beginning of the twentieth century” (Schickel, 1985, p. 23).

“Celebrity must be understood as a modern phenomenon, a phenomenon of mass-circulation newspapers, TV, radio and film.” (Rojek, 2001, p. 16).

If the phenomenon of celebrity is inextricably tied to cinema and television, what are we to make of celebrity in the twenty-first century? As I write, the number of Facebook members is starting to approach two billion–yes, almost a third of souls on the planet–and each month, various sources claim, over a billion people view video material on YouTube. Never mind the hundreds of millions of people using Twitter, Instagram, and Snapchat every day. The media landscape has changed beyond all recognition in the last two decades: these are mass, global communication systems like none before, spawning their own cultures of fame, and generating ‘stars’ with, it is claimed (Sehdev, 2014), greater social influence over younger generations than the movie stars and pop singers of 20 or so years ago. PewDiePie, the most popular YouTuber, has 62 million subscribers to his various channels, and many others have attracted over 10 million. But are these influential individuals really celebrities in the twentieth century sense of the word? In this book, I will argue they are, but to claim this requires us to examine what we really mean by celebrity, and to develop a concept of celebrity that is sensitive to cultural contexts, particularly in relation to their media landscapes.

The birth of ‘celebrity studies’ as an academic discipline is a thoroughly twenty-first century affair. When I produced my own early contribution to the literature, Illusions of Immortality (Giles, 2000), there was precious little academic literature to help me. Braudy had produced his exhaustive history of fame (Braudy, 1986), and, in a more sociological vein, there was Gamson’s analysis of American fame from Hollywood onwards (Gamson, 1994). Film scholars had for some time cultivated their own sub-field of ‘star studies’, where Dyer in particular blended a semiotic reading of star texts with a sociological analysis of their ideological significance (Dyer, 1979). But at the turn of the millennium, only Monaco’s (1978) Celebrity and Marshall’s (1997) Celebrity and Power had focused explicitly on the concept. In producing a psychological account of fame and celebrity, I was forced to take my ideas from biographies and press interviews by celebrities themselves.

Things took off rapidly after the turn of the century. Rojek published Celebrity (Rojek, 2001), and then came Turner’s Understanding Celebrity (Turner, 2004), followed by a slew of books and articles on the subject, culminating in the 2010 launch of the Routledge journal Celebrity Studies. This publication, and its associated biennial conference, have drawn together a wide international network of scholars from media, film, and television studies, right across the humanities and social sciences. There is plenty of contemporary writing on the subject. (For a comprehensive overview of the pre-Celebrity Studies literature, see Beer and Penfold-Mounce, 2010; see also Marshall and Redmond, 2015.)

Increasingly, scholars in the field are turning their critical gaze to the emergence of celebrity in digital media, with key studies on YouTube (García-Rapp, 2016; Smith, 2014 to cite just two), Instagram (Marwick, 2015), and Twitter (Marwick & boyd, 2011; Thomas, 2014; Kehrberg, 2015). Alice Marwick has argued that the digital explosion has brought about “two major changes in celebrity culture” (Marwick, 2016, p. 333): direct access to established celebrities via platforms like Twitter and the emergence of ‘micro-celebrity’, which is “a self-presentation technique in which people view themselves as a public persona to be consumed by others.” I will argue in this book that this second change has evolved rapidly as the social influence of digital media has spread across mainstream culture, with individuals who would have remained ‘micro’ celebrities now competing with, and surpassing, many traditional celebrities in popularity, especially as far as younger audiences are concerned.

In this opening chapter, I dig into the rapidly expanding academic literature to unearth some clues as to how we might understand the nature of celebrity in its contemporary form. Is celebrity really something that originated with cinema and broadcast media? What about the claim that the cultural conditions for celebrity emerged as far back as seventeenth century Restoration Theatre (Studlar, 2015)? Is there actually one single, unitary concept of celebrity that covers all periods, media cultures, and spheres of activity? Or is celebrity one of those words, like ‘community’ (Potter & Reicher, 1987), which can only be understood through the rhetorical force of its actual use, which may vary from moment to moment, even in the mouth of the same speaker? It would seem that the best place to start is to examine some definitions of the term.

DEFINING CELEBRITY

How has celebrity been defined by those who have studied it? One of the first things that becomes apparent when surveying the many and varied definitions in the literature is that no single definition has succeeded in accounting for all the individuals we habitually lump together under the term. As Driessens (2015) points out, we should at least be grateful for those writers who make the effort, but something is always missing.

Celebrity as Talk, Text or Sign

Luckhurst and Moody (2005, p. 1) begin their historical study of theatrical celebrity with these words: “Celebrity, the condition of being much talked about”. Definitions don’t come pithier than that, but clearly “being much talked about” is insufficient to capture all aspects of the phenomenon. For a start, who does the talking? Where? And exactly how much is required to create the condition of celebrity? Maybe Luckhurst and Moody are wise not to over-complicate matters. After all, researchers commonly adopt quantitative methods to ascertain just how famous a person is. In one study, van de Rijt, Shor, Ward, and Skiena (2013) amassed a corpus of names cited in various media and found that, across different domains, a subset of names enjoyed remarkable durability over time. It could be argued, alternatively, that these researchers were examining fame rather than celebrity per se.

The terms ‘fame’ and ‘celebrity’ are, more often than not, used interchangeably. In Giles (2000), I argued that they constitute two different phenomena. Fame is essentially a social process, by which individuals (or even their names) become well-known outside their immediate social circle. You can have fame in a school, or any organization; the Head Teacher is the usually the most famous individual in a school, followed by the class teachers (whose individual fame will vary for all sorts of reasons), but an individual student may, for whatever reason, eclipse the lot of them. Celebrity, I argued, is primarily a cultural phenomenon, which is why it has so often been associated with the media.

This brings us back to Luckhurst and Moody’s (2005) definition and the issue of where celebrities are talked about. “Modern celebrity,” argues Turner (2004, p. 8), “is a product of media representation,” and it is often assumed that, unlike fame more broadly, celebrity requires some form of mass communication, preferably an electronic one. But many authors are not content to see celebrity as simply a by-product of electronic media. As Gamson (1994, p. 16) argues, “the basic celebrity motifs of modern America were composed long before the development of mass cultural technologies”. Ultimately, it is the cultural formation brought about by mass representation that creates the conditions for celebrity to flourish, which enables such processes to take place as ‘celebritisation’ (the influence of celebrity on fields such as politics) and ‘celebrification’ (the process by which a private individual becomes a celebrity) (Driessens, 2013a).

The idea that celebrity transcends any specific medium or form of representation has led authors such as Marshall (1997, p. 52) towards a semiotic understanding of celebrity as both sign and text. This is ‘talk’ of a kind, but rather more complex and elusive than simply the citation of names in a newspaper. The semiotic definition allows us to cut across the various media in any time or place to see celebrity as a discursive construction, infused with various cultural and historical significations. If celebrity is, for example, “an extensive, industrialised, and inter-textual mode of gossip” (Goldsmith, 2009, p. 22), it can be said to perform essentially the same function for YouTubers like Zoella as for the Duke of Wellington in nineteenth century Britain.

But like Luckhurst and Moody’s talk-based definition, this broad brushstroke doesn’t really identify the essential distinction between celebrities and non-celebrities. Though it neatly describes the form that celebrity takes, at what point do all these signifiers produce celebrity for one person but only simple exposure for another? Perhaps it is not the amount of talk that goes on about them as much as the nature of that talk. Christine Geraghty (2000, p. 187) has argued that a celebrity is “someone whose fame rests overwhelmingly on what happens outside the sphere of their work, and who is famous for having a lifestyle”. This introduces a new dimension to the phenomenon: that of the ‘work’ the celebrity does. Rather than just being talked about, a celebrity needs to do something, whether or not it accords with our own particular work ethic.

This again, though, is only a partial definition because the nature of ‘sphere’ remains suitably vague. Geraghty is essentially talking about the distinction between a television personality, whom we always encounter in the workplace (the televisual sphere) and a sports performer like George Best who became a tabloid fixture long after his football career had nosedived. Would Best have become a celebrity in the first place were it not for his extraordinary skill in his sphere of work? And, in such a media-saturated, high-profile sport as football, does the sphere of work consist solely of the pitch, training ground, and changing room? The modern footballer, in high-definition close-up on regular live television, is also (in England in 2018 at least) a permanent fixture on Twitter.

Geraghty’s definition of celebrity makes it harder to fit to modern YouTubers and influencers, whose sphere of work is inseparable from their lifestyle. The same limitation applies also to many modern television personalities, such as the late Jade Goody, whose private and public performances, including her intensely scrutinised terminal illness, were acted out on the same stage (Bennett, 2011). Either these new forms of media representation constitute something new and different from celebrity, or we need to rethink some of the category boundaries we have placed around the concept.

Celebrity as Lived Experience

Thinking about celebrities as people (rather than representations, signs or texts) who have jobs and lifestyles, we might favour definitions that emphasise its lived experience, such as Ferris’s (2010, p. 393) claim that celebrity is “the experience of being recognized by far more people than one can recognize back”¹. Ferris uses this definition to lay claim to the phenomenon of ‘local celebrity’ (celebrities who are famous only in a delimited geographical area), likening this to ‘subcultural celebrity’ (Hills, 2003), a category likewise constrained by shared (sub)cultural concerns. To these one could also add ‘micro-celebrity’, a term initially coined to describe the ‘webcam girl’ phenomenon of the mid-2000s (Senft, 2008) and later extended by Marwick (2013) and others to describe the limited fame of social media pioneers in the early Silicon Valley start-up scene.

On the whole, particularly in the emergent field of celebrity studies, the study of lived celebrity experience has not been the approach taken by researchers. It is undoubtedly the case that celebrities constitute a hard-to-access ‘elite’, yet it is still surprising so few scholars have engaged directly with the question of what it is like to be a celebrity. One exception to this is Rockwell and Giles (2009), where it rather helped that the first author (Donna Rockwell, a former media employee) had useful contacts in the entertainment industry. Our study of the phenomenology of fame identified several core elements, positive and negative, that best captured its lived experience: a loss of privacy, a sense of objectification (‘entitization’), increased expectations from life, the gratification of certain ‘ego needs’, and the sensation of symbolic immortality. One could argue that these personal events arise out of the ‘talk’ already identified as constructing celebrity for society as a whole and which apply, to varying degrees, to all figures from international megastars down to Ferris’s (2010) local celebrities.

Other definitions of celebrity have taken the watching audience, or ‘public’, as the focus. A kind of midway point is John Ellis’s term for celebrity as ‘being-in-public’ (Ellis, 2015, p. 355), which extends the phenomenological theme by referencing Heidegger’s concept of ‘being-in-the-world’. For Ellis, media provide a public stage for individuals to act on, and the celebrity of the individual is that aspect of their performance visible to the audience. Like Geraghty’s (2000) definition, Ellis’s is rooted in the distinction between film and television stardom, the latter being more ‘public’ because the performer is acting in person rather than interpreting a character and a script. He has a little trouble applying it to digital forms of celebrity, however, arguing that social media enable everyone to have a public existence, but that “this does not mean that we are all celebrities now” (Ellis, 2015, p. 357). Celebrity, he suggests, still requires “the confines of the mass media”, meaning radio, press, and television, and that social media can only perform an ancillary role.

Celebrity as Comparative Term

Ellis’s differentiation between mass media and social media as two fundamentally different representational systems brings us to a central concern of this book. In chapter 2, I will develop a theoretical argument for treating social media first and foremost as media, but I want to turn briefly to sociological approaches that have defined celebrity in relation to its public status.

What constitutes ‘the public’, however, is no simple matter either. Rojek (2001, p. 9, his italics) has argued that celebrity is essentially about being “[tied] to a public” and how it involves “the attribution of glamorous or notorious status to an individual within the public sphere” (p. 10). So, this calls our attention towards another ‘sphere’, one that we all inhabit on a basis of inequality, certainly as far as glamour (or notoriety) is concerned. (These are, of course, those aspects of ‘lifestyle’ mentioned by Geraghty, but there is no sense in Rojek’s definition of them being disassociated from the celebrity’s sphere of work). The notion of the public sphere as a (mythical) place where celebrities become distinguished from ‘ordinary people’ is central to Couldry’s (2003) theory of media rituals. The ‘ritual media space’ of traditional broadcast media allows these distinctions to be understood as ‘natural’, thereby reinforcing the essential powerlessness of the ordinary person.

Tolson (2015) has explored how this process operates in the promotional literature around media (in this case, television). Through a discursive analysis of terminology in TV Times, a British television listings magazine, he identified a trend whereby the preferred term for famous people on television shifted from ‘personality’ during the 1950s to ‘celebrity’ in the 1960s. He argues that this arose out of the increasing use of ordinary members of the public in gameshows and other TV formats, and that this constitutes evidence for Couldry’s thesis that in these types of ritual events, the celebrity/public boundary becomes salient. Other studies of the interactional dynamics in shows where ordinary people participate under the control of a media professional (e.g. a presenter) have revealed the subtle ways in which this boundary is reinforced (Giles, 2002a; Smith, 2010).

How might celebrity in contemporary digital culture be understood as a function of media rituals? YouTube celebrity could be seen as a continuation of the trend whereby genres like reality TV reinforce the symbolic boundaries between celebrities and ordinary people. On the other hand, it could be argued that the various strands of social media have broken open the ritual media space to an extent that ‘populist’ politicians like Donald Trump can use Twitter and other outlets to attack ‘the establishment’. In later work, Couldry has argued that social media have created a different mythical space conceived as “the place where ‘we’ come together” (Couldry, 2015, p. 621). As I will go on to argue in the next chapter, the success of Trump and other (apparent) political ‘outsiders’ may result partly from the failure, on behalf of voters and the mainstream press, to perceive social media as media.

Towards a Material/Discursive Approach to Celebrity

To recap, there seem to be three broad trends in defining celebrity that derive from different epistemological, or possibly disciplinary, positions. One is that celebrity is defined in terms of how it is talked about (a discursive definition); a second is that it is defined by its impact on the individual celebrity (a psychological ...