Page 97 - Battleground The Media Volume 1 and 2

| Celebr ty Worsh p and Fandom

(December 2003), http://www.democraticmedia.org/resources/articles/Pub_File_14pdf.
pdf; Streeter, Thomas. “Blue Skies and Strange Bedfellows: The Discourse of Cable Tele-
vision.” In The Revolution Wasn’t Televised: Sixties Television and Social Conflict, ed.,
Lynn Spigel and Michael Curtin, 221–42. New York: Routledge, 1997.

John McMurria

CeleBrity worshiP and FandoM

The faces, fashionable figures, and extravagant lifestyles of media celebri-
ties have become part of audiences’ everyday lives. Proliferating entertainment
news shows, Web sites, and magazines have created levels of familiarity and in-
timacy previously only shared with those in our immediate social environment.
However, when celebrities become objects of fans’ affection, the psychological
bonds between fans and their favorite stars can rarely be described as worship or
one-sided adoration, as fans and audiences negotiate and appropriate the media
products through which they encounter the celebrity. They thus construct dis-
tinct meanings in their reading of mediated individuals.
A poignant and often echoed definition of celebrity was offered by Dan-
iel Boorstin as early as half a century ago when he identified a celebrity as a
“person who is known for his well-knownness” (1961, p. 58). Boorstin’s defi-
nition highlights two key aspects of the cultural phenomenon of celebrity.
First is its self-perpetuating nature in which media exposure breeds celebrity
and celebrity furthers exposure. This inherent spiral of celebrity is unmasked
in the recent rise of jet set—and reality television—celebrities, exemplified by
Paris Hilton, whose celebrity status appears unrelated to any recognizable pro-
fessional achievements. However, the difference between such recent examples
of celebrity and more traditional manifestations of stardom such as film and
sports stars in the first half of the twentieth century, the rise of pop musicians in
the postwar period, and fashion models since the 1980s is one of degree rather
than kind. Celebrity is thus a distinctly modern occurrence tied to the trans-
formations of consumption, communication, and everyday life in industrial
modernity. Second, Boorstin’s definition points to the importance of audiences’
sustained interaction with celebrities in media consumption allowing for de-
grees of familiarity and intimacy.

CELEBriTy anD inTimaCy
This perceived intimacy and its psychological consequences have been a
focus of academic research on media power as well as the relationship between
mass media and self. The presence and importance of celebrities in audiences’
everyday lives has been viewed by early mass communication research as an
indication of the power that media exercise over audiences: some have identi-
fied film stars as manifestations of “pseudo-individuality,” which is maintained
through shallow variations of physical appearance seeking to mask the inher-
ent standardization of life and conformity in industrial societies (Horkheimer
and Adorno 1972). The pretense and artificiality of the relationship between