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First edition 2018
Copyright David C. Giles
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CELEBRITY STUDIES AND THE CHANGING MEDIA LANDSCAPE
There was no such thing as celebrity prior to the beginning of the twentieth century (Schickel, 1985, p. 23).
Celebrity must be understood as a modern phenomenon, a phenomenon of mass-circulation newspapers, TV, radio and film. (Rojek, 2001, p. 16).
If the phenomenon of celebrity is inextricably tied to cinema and television, what are we to make of celebrity in the twenty-first century? As I write, the number of Facebook members is starting to approach two billionyes, almost a third of souls on the planetand each month, various sources claim, over a billion people view video material on YouTube. Never mind the hundreds of millions of people using Twitter, Instagram, and Snapchat every day. The media landscape has changed beyond all recognition in the last two decades: these are mass, global communication systems like none before, spawning their own cultures of fame, and generating stars with, it is claimed (Sehdev, 2014), greater social influence over younger generations than the movie stars and pop singers of 20 or so years ago. PewDiePie, the most popular YouTuber, has 62 million subscribers to his various channels, and many others have attracted over 10 million. But are these influential individuals really celebrities in the twentieth century sense of the word? In this book, I will argue they are, but to claim this requires us to examine what we really mean by celebrity, and to develop a concept of celebrity that is sensitive to cultural contexts, particularly in relation to their media landscapes.
The birth of celebrity studies as an academic discipline is a thoroughly twenty-first century affair. When I produced my own early contribution to the literature, Illusions of Immortality (Giles, 2000), there was precious little academic literature to help me. Braudy had produced his exhaustive history of fame (Braudy, 1986), and, in a more sociological vein, there was Gamsons analysis of American fame from Hollywood onwards (Gamson, 1994). Film scholars had for some time cultivated their own sub-field of star studies, where Dyer in particular blended a semiotic reading of star texts with a sociological analysis of their ideological significance (Dyer, 1979). But at the turn of the millennium, only Monacos (1978) Celebrity and Marshalls (1997) Celebrity and Power had focused explicitly on the concept. In producing a psychological account of fame and celebrity, I was forced to take my ideas from biographies and press interviews by celebrities themselves.
Things took off rapidly after the turn of the century. Rojek published Celebrity (Rojek, 2001), and then came Turners Understanding Celebrity (Turner, 2004), followed by a slew of books and articles on the subject, culminating in the 2010 launch of the Routledge journal Celebrity Studies. This publication, and its associated biennial conference, have drawn together a wide international network of scholars from media, film, and television studies, right across the humanities and social sciences. There is plenty of contemporary writing on the subject. (For a comprehensive overview of the pre-Celebrity Studies literature, see Beer and Penfold-Mounce, 2010; see also Marshall and Redmond, 2015.)
Increasingly, scholars in the field are turning their critical gaze to the emergence of celebrity in digital media, with key studies on YouTube (Garca-Rapp, 2016; Smith, 2014 to cite just two), Instagram (Marwick, 2015), and Twitter (Marwick & boyd, 2011; Thomas, 2014; Kehrberg, 2015). Alice Marwick has argued that the digital explosion has brought about two major changes in celebrity culture (Marwick, 2016, p. 333): direct access to established celebrities via platforms like Twitter and the emergence of micro-celebrity, which is a self-presentation technique in which people view themselves as a public persona to be consumed by others. I will argue in this book that this second change has evolved rapidly as the social influence of digital media has spread across mainstream culture, with individuals who would have remained micro celebrities now competing with, and surpassing, many traditional celebrities in popularity, especially as far as younger audiences are concerned.
In this opening chapter, I dig into the rapidly expanding academic literature to unearth some clues as to how we might understand the nature of celebrity in its contemporary form. Is celebrity really something that originated with cinema and broadcast media? What about the claim that the cultural conditions for celebrity emerged as far back as seventeenth century Restoration Theatre (Studlar, 2015)? Is there actually one single, unitary concept of celebrity that covers all periods, media cultures, and spheres of activity? Or is celebrity one of those words, like community (Potter & Reicher, 1987), which can only be understood through the rhetorical force of its actual use, which may vary from moment to moment, even in the mouth of the same speaker? It would seem that the best place to start is to examine some definitions of the term.
DEFINING CELEBRITY
How has celebrity been defined by those who have studied it? One of the first things that becomes apparent when surveying the many and varied definitions in the literature is that no single definition has succeeded in accounting for all the individuals we habitually lump together under the term. As Driessens (2015) points out, we should at least be grateful for those writers who make the effort, but something is always missing.
Celebrity as Talk, Text or Sign
Luckhurst and Moody (2005, p. 1) begin their historical study of theatrical celebrity with these words: Celebrity, the condition of being much talked about. Definitions dont come pithier than that, but clearly being much talked about is insufficient to capture all aspects of the phenomenon. For a start, who does the talking? Where? And exactly how much is required to create the condition of celebrity? Maybe Luckhurst and Moody are wise not to over-complicate matters. After all, researchers commonly adopt quantitative methods to ascertain just how famous a person is. In one study, van de Rijt, Shor, Ward, and Skiena (2013) amassed a corpus of names cited in various media and found that, across different domains, a subset of names enjoyed remarkable durability over time. It could be argued, alternatively, that these researchers were examining
