How can we account for the ubiquity of the celebrity in today's media? A celebrity is a person who is widely recognized and known about in a society.

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Daniel Burborough Com911 Essay Assignment

Question 4: How can we account for the ubiquity of the celebrity in today’s media?

A celebrity is a person who is widely recognized and known about in a . Celebrities are often well-known in the news and they often take over sections of the magazine market and TV schedules around the world. They appear in television adverts and entertainment forms around the globe from music to film.

Most would be quick to believe and enforce the idea that the reason we have celebrities in our media is just to make money. As Graeme Turner has recently noted, the industry around celebrity ‘creates highly visible products that most of us buy at one time or another and which play a significant part of our everyday lives’ This ideology is not discernibly far from the truth as it is easy to notice the wealth involved in the form of celebrity features in advertisements on TV, radio and magazines or starring in the latest Hollywood blockbuster. Whatever form it is what they do culminates to produce an influential commodity culture. From this we can argue that the reason we have celebrities dominating our media are to create a market around the products they endorse and that we in turn buy. Celebrities appearing on commercials and merchandising products within media forms will result in vast amounts of money going to executives in the media businesses that are promoting the celebrities and also to the celebrities themselves. I would argue against this being the sole reason accounting for the ubiquity of celebrities though. This is because we have always had the need as humans to have a figure head, a role model if you will, upon which we can base our own identities. Celebrities act as these figure heads to which many of us forge our identity out of.

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‘Information and ideas promoted by these celebrities within the media do not merely reflect the social world, but contribute to its shape, and are central to modern reflexivity’. Using this idea we can suggest that we have celebrities within our media to provide us not only with an example of how to live in a society but a basis upon which we set our characteristics against, striving to become like our “hero”. I would agree with this idea as it is clear to see that the people who are presented to us in whatever form do have a profound effect. A ...

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