Page 208 - CULTURE IN THE COMMUNICATION AGE

STAR CULTURE

important components in all these activities, helping to sell ‘product’ while
engendering feelings of familiarity, reliability, and trust within the consuming
public.
Concerning time and space, stars often cross borders with startling speed.
Movies play in many parts of the world the same week. An actor can become an
‘overnight success’ in many different parts of the globe at the same time. The
World Cup and Super Bowl create instant sports celebrities. Identical videos
are seen minutes apart in Europe, Asia, and North and South America. Time –
as a unitary, regulating, sequencing of events – collapses. Star images circulate
through geographic space where the only border checkpoints are local cable
systems and satellite providers. Space stretches to the point where the concept
of ‘country’ becomes almost quaint. Even ‘local’ telecommunications networks
scramble to describe themselves as ‘global’. Observing time and space as they mani-
fest themselves in the creation of modern entertainment and the production of
stardom, we sense a true new world order where time and space not only change,
but merge in new, accelerated ways. McGrew elaborates upon this process:

[we can] conceive of globalization as having two interrelated dimen-
sions: scope (‘stretching’) and intensity (or ‘deepening’). On the one
hand, the concept of globalization defines a universal process or set of
processes which generate a multiplicity of linkages and interconnec-
tions between states and societies which make up the modern world
system: the concept therefore has a spatial connotation. Social, political
and economic activities are becoming ‘stretched’ across the globe, such
that events, decisions, and activities in one part of the world can come
to have immediate significance for individuals and communities in
quite distant parts of the global system. On the other hand, globaliza-
tion also implies an intensification in the levels of interaction, inter-
connectedness, or interdependence between the states and societies
which constitute the modern world community. Accordingly, along-
side this ‘stretching’ goes a ‘deepening’ . . . Thus globalization involves
a growing interpenetration of the global human condition with the
particularities of place and individuality.
(McGrew 1992: 68–9)

Fame is by no means unique to the contemporary world; heroes have always
been with us. What has changed is the manner by which symbolic forms are
produced, and the contexts in which they are consumed. These changes are
intimately tied up with modernity and postmodernity and compose a crucial
component of cultural life today. Only by examining the historical develop-
ment of fame, modern notions of time and space, and the changing modes
of production and consumption in the mediated world, can we begin to
explain the impact of stardom on modern life. The need for such a theoretical
overview was recognized years ago by Richard Dyer:

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