Page 42 - Communication Cultural and Media Studies The Key Concepts

CLASS

human image it conveys is intensified and the number of individuals
celebrated expands’. The promise of photography and theatre in the
construction of fame in previous eras has certainly nowbeen realised
with the increase in media forms that include tabloid newspapers,
magazines and entertainment-focused TV networks such as E in the
US, not to mention a myriad official and unofficial celebrity websites.
Although stars and celebrities have subtle differences in their
creation, the purposes they serve for their audiences or fans are similar.
Celebrities act as signs or media texts in that they provide a means by
which media consumers can negotiate and work towards articulating
personal subjectivity. Wark (1999) and Lumby (1999a), for example,
claim that unlike the construction of stars, the construction of a
celebrity is reliant on matters that would be considered everyday or
ordinary. One aspect of the appeal of celebrities is that they perform the
ordinary. Stories involving celebrities will often involve these
extraordinary people in everyday/ordinary contexts of divorce, drug
abuse, weight issues and romance. This desire to ‘separate celebrities
from their images’ (Lumby, 1999a: 139) is explicitly revealed in some
of the tabloid’s most often-used headlines – ‘Stars without their
makeup’ and ‘So-and-so at home’.
The ordinary value embodied in celebrities has caused some to
comment that they are ‘the ideal representation of the triumph of the
masses’ (Marshall, 1997: 6). Others suggest that celebrities do little
more than contribute to a continued dumbing down of societal values,
distracting populations from matters of importance such as politics,
economics and religion. But this is to ignore the changing aspects of
the public sphere, where important civil discourses are being
challenged, discussed and debated via the bodies of celebrities.
Celebrities do not represent the triumph of the ordinary; rather, they
represent the possibility of popular representations concerning private/
ordinary matters in a sphere long dominated by outdated models of
civility.
See also: Dumbing down, Identification, Star/stardom, Subjectivity

Further reading: Braudy (1986); Gamson (1994); Lumby (1999a); Turner et al.
(2000); Wark (1999)

CLASS

Class serves as a means of understanding the economic and cultural
divisions that exist between individuals in society. In its common-sense

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