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DUE TO A SERIES OF UNFORTUNATE EVENTS, THE “NORMAL” CHAPTER OVERVIEW OF WEEKLY CONTENT WILL HAVE TO WAIT … As it stands, this is a murky assemblage of random bits that doesn’t yet make sense …
There are a number of explicit links to earlier concepts that are directly relevant to explaining the intersection of celebrities and participatory culture. In a link to previous discussions,
Contemporary political leaders are often represented and read in ways not dissimilar to celebrities drawn from the world of show business. Our relationship with politicians has thus become more intimate … while figures from the world of entertainment frequently endorse political parties and candidates or – deliberately or inadvertently – signify wider political movements.[1]
And, beyond talking about how celebrities are becoming politicians (and politicians becoming celebrities), it might also be useful to invoke the phenomenon of transfandom[2]. Remember, “like memes, transfandom works and spaces ‘constitute shared spheres of cultural knowledge’ or experiential ‘third spaces’ in which ‘multiple fandoms, texts, and meanings’ commingle and recombine in ways that, when successful, provoke what Roland Barthes adamantly calls the ‘bliss’ of intertextual recognition” (Morimoto, 2018, p. 78). Which is to say, fans go beyond searching across (trans) media for content related to their celebrity-object-of-affection; they also create content formed through the confluence of different fandoms.
Not to mention, anti-fandom clearly motivates some celebrity-oriented publics online.
Celebrity culture is, of course, indebted to participatory culture as fans and their affective labour are integral to the prominence of celebrities in popular culture. Celebrity doesn’t exist without audiences and their (sometimes feverish) attention: “Celebrity was, in its earliest usage, linked to ‘fame’; but it was also linked to the word ‘thronged’, a derivation indicating something of the activity around the celebrity, gesturing towards, for instance, the acts of talking about and congregating around them; a vibrant, social quality that is also connected to celebrity’s predecessor as a noun, ‘celebration’” (Littler, 2016, p. 119).[3]
[all the good stuff
PARASOCIAL
Parasocial interaction with media figures in an earlier era would typically be understood as a variety of pathology; a pseudo-social relationship with someone whom one doesn’t ‘really’ know, typically one-sided and often extreme in its affective nature. The extreme variety of this was the sick and obsessed fan who thought they ‘knew’ someone even though this was only through media representations, hysterical or manic in their pursuit of a relationship. “Attention to participatory culture flips the script. It looks at the way such fans use opportunities to form networks that: express their collective intelligence; enable their individual creativity; help them to educate themselves and to discover their civic power” (Duffett, 2018, p. 473).