Two Important POINTS from the Readings
Interactive Nature
According to Senft, the main quality of a micro-celebrity is their interactive nature. engaged in ongoing emotional labour to support their audience relationships and grow their popularity. This demonstrates that it is a crucial component of all modern micro-celebrities. The entire industry started as a potent mashup of soft-core pornography, feminism, postfeminism, and exhibitionism. These elements still exist today and are widely distributed on social media platforms like YouTube. It is now a recognised trait of all online activities, regardless of their audience size.
The success of ‘Instafame’
When analysing micro-celebrity, it's vital to be careful not to see it as a "democratisation" of celebrity. A variety of different arguments can be made regarding how the "demotic turn" reproduces and reorganises current power and inequality connections. Marwick contends that successful practitioners often "reproduce conventional status hierarchies of luxury, celebrity, and popularity" in regard to the "Instafame" of Instagram, for instance, mimicking and effectively extending the aesthetic orientations of mainstream celebrity. If the "demotic turn" gives a much larger portion of the population greater access to the celebrity production process, that access is given "not to the everyman or every-woman but to those able to credibly inhabit celebrity subjectivity thanks to a set of physical and aesthetic criteria that are anything but common," according to the author.
What impacts do celebrities have on how you understand society and yourself?
Celebrities bring almost entirely understandings in life. Celebrities are known for their personal lives, professional lives, lifestyles and public appearance. Everyone knows that each artist has published news about them and as a viewer, we watched, read, and learned about what product they used for better life and fulfilling needs, their life stories, and so on. These celebrities bring inspiration to their fans, so their fans will also use the same products or even learn life lesson’s stories from the celebrities’ experiences. For example, my mom always uses Samsung products because she is inspired by all Korean drama actors who also use Samsung products while on shoot. I, myself, learned about how cruel the world is, especially in celebrities’ marriage life. One case that I learned about is Adam Levine and Behati Prinslo’ s recent case about Adam Levine cheating on his wife. Therefore, I decided to choose my future husband wisely. Last, celebrities' lives can be brought up to be a topic of learning in class. Sometimes, lecturers take celebrities as an example to explain to the students’ learning topics. In my experience, one of my lecturers brought up “Kanye West'' as an example to show a celebrity figure in class. These three examples show how celebrities have an impact on society, including myself.
In what ways do you think celebrity culture has changed over the last few years?
There are many ways celebrity culture has changed in entire decades. First, the impact of the existence of social media brings huge changes in celebrity culture. Nowadays, Instagram has changed culture beyond recognition. Generally, people are now able to follow up the everyday life style of a celebrity and communicate directly with them without control from their management. As a result, a celebrity's image now revolves less on a set of fixed traits and more around a fluid, organic performance in which the audience is invited to take part. Celebrities must constantly develop a persona that is personal, real, and approachable. This can actually mean instantly disclosing their true ideas in some situations in a way that wasn't previously conceivable. For some superstars, however, this entails creating a product that is as meticulously planned as a magazine picture session and is intended for general public consumption. This hazy line separates reality from appearance has made space for a massive new type of celebrity endorsement.
Analyse
An ideological approach (a symptomatic reading)
In the celebrity text in the form of a magazine cover above, based on the ideological approach, symptomatic reading is concerned with understanding how a text means what it does as opposed to just describing what it means. Symptomatic reading considers meaning to be cultural rather than natural and is interested in explaining how culture shapes and determines the reading of texts by readers. The text describes the style used in spring which is synonymous with floral clothing. This means an ideology that floral clothes depict spring where spring is coloured by the growth of various flowers that begin to bloom after winter, therefore the depiction of style in spring is always related to clothes that have floral motifs like the one used by Selena in the cover. the magazine.
A political economy approach
Based on the political and economic approach the use of celebrity text in magazine covers or other media provides benefits for both, the field of political economy is the study of how economic theories such as capitalism or communism play in real life. In the cover of the magazine there is text which advertises the design of clothes or clothes from a designer, the description of the clothes used by Selena is also to attract the attention of readers to buy the product so that capitalism is implied in the cover of the magazine through celebrity text. The magazine uses a cover of Selena because Selena is a famous actress and singer who can influence her readers to see or buy goods in the form of clothes designed by designers who have collaborated with the magazine. So based on the political economy approach, celebrity text has a big impact on the advancement of an economy, this is because fans of the celebrity will be affected by it so they try to imitate whatever is used by their idol.