Framing celebrity: New directions in celebrity culture

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It is a truism to suggest that celebrity pervades all areas of life today. The growth and expansion of celebrity culture in recent years has been accompanied by an explosion of studies of the social function of celebrity and investigations into the fascination of specific celebrities. And yet fundamental questions about what the system of celebrity means for our society have yet to be resolved: Is celebrity a democratization of fame or a powerful hierarchy built on exclusion? Is celebrity created through public demand or is it manufactured? Is the growth of celebrity a harmful dumbing down of culture or an expansion of the public sphere? Why has celebrity come to have such prominence in today’s expanding media? Milly Williamson unpacks these questions for students and researchers alike, re-examining some of the accepted explanations for celebrity culture. The book questions assumptions about the inevitability of the growth of celebrity culture, instead explaining how environments we.

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Marketing is an active process that ranges from informal daily presentations of the self (or persona) through to more formal activities. Fame, on the other hand, is passive and is attributed to persons, usually due to some sort of informal or formal ‘marketing’ process. Sociology and psychology offer complementary perspectives on fame and fame construction. There are both positive and negative aspects to fame, just as there are with gossip in terms of reinforcing certain social or cultural norms or, alternatively, creating new norms and cultural tastes. Fame is not easily controlled as it is an attribution given by others. However, it can be managed to some extent - as long as fame itself does not become the persona or the objective, or what Katariina Kakko & Pekka Isotalus call the ‘dominating celebrity persona’ . Associated with this, unfortunately, fame can also lead to retrospective reinterpretation or revisionism of previous histories, not necessarily initiated by the famous individuals but by their followers/adherents/disciples. Fame can be, and often is, used for the common good; it is a very useful means of bringing about social, cultural and political change.

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This essay examines the current perspectives on celebrity history, following the varied theoretical understandings of historicisation in particular. The critical analysis of different approaches allows for the distinguishment of the major problem entailed by historicising celebrity. In order to avoid it, I propose a broader perspective of fame history. As presented later, the shift of focus towards fame rather than celebrity was foreshadowed in many milestone works on celebrity history before. The final part of the text offers a methodological tool that could serve as a bridge between different traditions dealing with celebrity and other kinds of fame.

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Pacific Journalism Review

THIS ISSUE of Pacific Journalism Review engages with the theme of the dynamics of fame in a small country. In contrast to the dominant focus in the newly emergent field of Celebrity Studies on celebrity as a global phenomenon, the emphasis in this issue is on the interface between the global and the local; on questions of how the distinctiveness of national and local values fares when caught up in or of willingly imitating the circulation of global fame and influence. Accounts of celebrity often focus on the notion of fetishism—the complex process through which specific idols become objects of veneration on whose admirable or even infamous qualities are presented as emanating from the inner recesses of a luminous personality. The importance of this aspect of celebrity and celebrity worship is not to be denied. But there is another feature of celebrity and stardom that complements and energises the engagement of fans, the interest of the general public and the ambitions of the press .

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