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212 COMMUNICA TION THEORY
Instead celebrities refer to each other as though they make up the entire
population. The familiar statement of the media celebrity concerning parties
that ‘everyone will be there’ or ‘everyone is here’ implies that the celebrity
class posits itself as standing in for all classes.
Those who are locked outside this celebrity class must find ways of
sharing in it at-a-distance in ways discussed above, or accept their exclusion
by participation in ritual attention to the anomic condition. The contempo-
rary talk show is an example of this, fixated with unhappy and unsatisfied
guests who, staged or otherwise, confess their loneliness, or feelings of rejec-
tion at losing a partner (see below for an extended discussion).
Horton and Wohl (1956) argue, based on the American experience,
that insofar as the production of anomie is, in part, internal to media, the
anomic class is recognized by the mass media themselves, and ‘from time-
to-time specially designed offerings have been addressed to this minority’
(223). They give the example from 1951 of a very popular radio pro-
gramme in the USA – ‘The Lonesome Gal’. As they describe the pro-
gramme, it sounds very much like a forerunner of reality television,
which is, ‘in fact, nothing but the reciprocal of the spectator’s own para-
social role’ (224). What they mean by this is that instead of being a man-
aged or self-contained drama, ‘The Lonesome Gal’ presented a character
who could potentially be any person in the audience, anyone ‘ordinary’
from the street. ‘Her entire performance consisted of an unbroken mono-
logue, unembarrassed by plot, climax or denouement. The Lonesome Gal
simply spoke in a throaty, unctuous voice whose suggestive sexiness
belied the seeming modesty of her words’ (224). But most importantly the
Lonesome Gal appealed to her audience as being ‘only one of millions of
lonely girls, seeking love and companionship’, and in doing so,
empathized with the low visibility that ‘lonely heart’ audience members
might feel on a daily basis, but which the programme was actually
helping reproduce. This basic structure of interchangeability between an
audience member’s aspirations to be recognized, and a non-celebrity role-
model who occupies precisely such a place of recognition, is manifest in
all forms of reality genres, which are discussed further below.
But the dominant fields of recognition from which all forms of broad-
cast recognition spring are based on a division between high and low
visibility of personalities. Fame is, by definition, concentrated among a
few, and the gap between the famous and the ordinary can be measured
in economic terms by the endorsements, appearance and advertising fees
actually paid to celebrities. More recently, it is also possible to measure the
fame of a celebrity by websites, such as Fametracker, devoted to auditing,
summarizing and documenting their fan support, covering the volume of
and loyalty to numerous sites devoted to celebrity deification. There are
also celebrity exchanges such as Celebdaq (UK) and Hollywood SX (USA)
where imaginary currency is used to buy and sell celebrity stock. And
celebrities themselves are using the World Wide Web to extend the
market that they establish on the screen. Upon the pretext of revealing an