Celebrities and The Media

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Course Code: DA204 TMA 01

Give an account of the relationship between celebrities and the media using the trio of Production, Text and Audience.

Celebrity and the media are symbiotic. The media use celebrity as a form of populist entertainment and as a commodity. Celebrities rely on the media to make them visible to the public. The media is an intermediate agency that allows communications between individuals that are at a distance from one another. The media construct celebrities through the communication of images and representations.  Celebrities are meant to posses a natural talent, to be the charismatic individual, but it is the mediated persona that makes them seem charismatic (Evans, 2005). As Daniel Boorstin (1971) states the celebrity is ‘Fabricated on purpose to satisfy our exaggerated expectations of human greatness’.  A celebrity’s charisma is reliant on their distance from the ordinary public but they can only become ‘the few known by many’ if they appear in mediated texts (Evans, 2005). The circulation of the mediated text is vital in making the mediated persona visible but at the same time keeping a distance from their audience. Celebrity is not a wholly new concept, however it has always been dependent on media management (Braudy, 1997). Images and representations of individuals have been spread by societies in the past. Certain devices used to turn someone into a celebrity, or as the process is called, the celebritisation of an individual, are used today as they were used in the past. With the development of technologies, which play a part in the emergence of the film star and thus the need for mass medias. Cultural declinists' see as celebritisation as a negative development, especially the celebritisation of politics. Populist would argue celebrity is a positive advance in media communication and celebrity epitomizes personal freedom.

        

There are three main approaches that show that celebrity is socially produced. A post-structuralist approach to celebrity focuses on the idea that the power is held both by the individual and collectively. This is in direct opposition to the political economy approach that sees the power with media institutions, controlling celebrities as commodities. An organisational sociology focuses on the position of the media worker. David Marshall focuses on how the power is dispersed and internalised. His approach is based on Michel Focualt’s view of power and sees the celebrity persona developed by media technologies, for example the cinema or television. The celebrity is constructed in a way that the audience can make sense of the social world (Marshall, 1997). Marshall identifies that celebrities, as individuals or as part of the media, have two major roles in modern societies. In a democratic society audiences relate to celebrities by viewing their struggles of representation as synonymous with their own struggles with identity. The other role of celebrities sees celebrity discourses as a way of controlling the masses or as Marshall (1997) puts it ‘…the celebrity is a locus of formative social power in consumer capitalism’. Marshall's concept sees the entertainment industries constructing two types of celebrity, the film star and the television personality, that represent different forms of identity (Hesmondhalgh, 2005). Marshall (1997) states that ‘…the film star is constructed to possess a great deal of power to determine his or her own future, film projects, and public image’. Johnny Depp started his career as a teen idol, however as his career developed he started choosing films that moved away from his teen idol persona, and has developed into a cinema artiste. He has always kept his life with his wife and his children private, but through interviews and the film choices he has made, we also have a sense of his ideals. He is distant to the spectator but the spectator also identifies with how he wishes for a private life. The TV personality is more familiar. Marshall (1997) says the ‘The television celebrity embodies the characteristics of familiarity and mass accessibility’.

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We can examine celebrities through production as we have seen previously but another way of examining celebrities is through textual analysis. Textual analysis helps us to understand they way that the media operates. By analysing the texts that celebrities appear in, for example films, television programmes or newspapers, and by analysing the celebrities themselves as a text, we can make meaning of them. Texts are categorised so that we know what to expect from them and therefore can recognise the underlying conventions within the text, whether we are aware of it or not. A closed text is where conventions are ...

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