1. INTRODUCTION
1.1 Research Background and Motivation
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1. Introduction
1.1 Research Background and Motivation
“Without convenient personal media, it seems that all the reporting of celebrity gossips and news are mass media’s privilege; however, when blog gets popular, sharing personal life on blog has become celebrities’ new tool to be renowned on cyberspace.” (Business Weekly, 2005)
Contemporary celebrities are products of mass communication (Boorstin, 1961;
Gamson, 1994; Rein et al, 1987) and symbolic icons created and promoted by the media.
According to Dyer (1986, p 2), celebrities’ persona is not confined to their professional images, but is composed of everything about them which is publicly available. Thus, celebrity is an inter-textual sign formed in multiple ways. People used to form impressions and images of a celebrity mainly through traditional media such as newspapers, television, radio, gossip magazines, etc. However, as new media technologies have advanced, Internet-based applications such as blogs, social networking sites, and microblogs, all of which may be referred to as social media1, have gradually become significant platforms for the molding of celebrity images.
When talking about social media, Web 2.0 and User Generated Content (UGC) are two important concepts (Kaplan& Haenlein, 2010). According to Kaplan and Haenlein (2010), Web 2.0 is a term which was developed in 2004 to describe a new way of creating and publishing Internet content and applications. These are no longer produced by one person; instead, they are continuously modified by all users in a participatory fashion. On
1 According to the definition from Wikipedia, social media is the use of web-based and mobile technologies to turn communication into interactive dialogue. It includes applications such as blog, wiki, podcast, etc.
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the other hand, UGC refers to the various forms of media content that are publicly available and generated by end-users. Thus, based on these two concepts, social media consists of a group of Internet-based applications which are built on the ideological and technological foundations of Web 2.0 and enable the creation and exchange of UGC (p 61).
The interactive nature of social media has opened up a conversation between celebrities and the general public. For example, Lin Yi-Chen (林依晨), a famous Taiwanese actress, once said, “…blogs allow fans to better understand a celebrity” (Apple Daily, 2005).
Twitter, the largest microblogging service in the U.S., enables various Hollywood stars to tell the public what they have for breakfast. On Facebook, celebrities can create their own page, share their thoughts, and be “liked” by millions of people. These user-friendly interfaces enable celebrities to keep a log of what they are doing in their lives. From what they are working on, to their specific mood at that minute, and even self-promotion, celebrities are able to inform the world of anything on their minds with the click of a button.
Thus, traditional media is no longer the only space where a celebrity is molded, and celebrities, just like many of us, have become active content generators.
These interactive platforms also provide the mass media with a new source from which to gather news. In the past, celebrities lacked the means to produce wide-scale publications and they needed to maintain a symbiotic relationship with the mass media to have their latest news delivered to the public. However, the development of these interactive interfaces gives celebrities a new space, other than mass media, where they can get exposure. Celebrities can write diaries, upload photos, post links in a space which they can control. Thus, all of these contents have become an important source of news for the traditional media to write news stories; for example, Liu (2007, p.ii) conducted research on how blogs are used as one of the major sources of entertainment news in Taiwan. She found that Taiwanese reporters go to celebrities’ blogs to dig for newsworthy materials when
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celebrities decline to be interviewed or when they have no other means of accessing them.
Liu (2007) further suggested that, although the information collected by reporters in this way is not word-of-mouth, it is still considered to be a source of credible information, since it comes from the celebrities or their agents, and represents their official voice. For celebrities, social media is a trustworthy space for them to share information. They can decide the words and phrases to use without worrying that they will be twisted by unauthorized sources. This also prevents the possibility of erroneous words being spoken when faced with the on-the-spot pressure of a microphone.
Since celebrities are aware that their updates or publications on the Internet may be adopted as news material, they also take advantage of this power to voice their opinions.
The China Times made the following comment regarding this trend:
“Zhou Yu Kou(周玉蔻) and Chen Jian Zhou(陳建州) made their statements on blog regarding the social welfare; Yi Neng Jing (伊能靜) wrote her feeling of being single on her blog after divorce…blogging news has become so popular among celebrities and their ‘news releases’ are almost as instantaneous as reporters.” (China Times, 2010)
Celebrities share their private lives using social media. However, the fame of celebrities, the number of viewers and the media attention that follows, has made these social media interfaces different from those operated by ordinary people. In other words, all these private thoughts being shown publicly have become kinds of “performances”
that will inevitably be examined by the public and mass media.
For example, the YouTube channel of Lady Gaga, one of the most renowned and successful pop stars in recent years, has garnered more than a billion views. She has accumulated over 30 million “Likes” on Facebook and has become the “Queen of Twitter”,
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surpassing Britney Spears as the most-followed user on the platform. ThinkTank Digital, the company that organized Gaga’s promotion on social media, pointed out that the main focus of its strategy was a “good balance between promotion and authenticity.” Although Lady Gaga’s Facebook account is operated by a number of people, including Gaga herself, she alone maintains her Twitter account. Elshahawi, the co-founder of the company, said “she didn’t want anything promotional on her Twitter account” (Elshahawi, 2011). This suggests that, if snaps taken of celebrities by the paparazzi enable audiences to peep into their private lives, celebrities’ own social media texts may present another version of the “truth”, which is subtly manufactured to feed the mass media and the audience’s craving for authenticity, and to create certain images that meet celebrities’ needs.
This public-private nature of celebrities’ social media behavior was also addressed by Holme and Redmond (2006), when they contended that the intensity of the glare and nature of surveillance in contemporary society have created a visionary regime which leaves very little space for stars and celebrities to be “offscreen, out of print and switched off”, and they are often forced to be continually “in role, in performance, as media beings.” They argued the following:
“The constant search for truth—even if it is a search for the ‘lies’ that hide behind the idealized mask of stardom and celebrification—is intensified in an age where new media technologies and new media formats have increased the range and nature of surveillance.” (p.210)
Thus, under this ubiquitous surveillance, how a celebrity uses social media, a space where the boundary of public and private blurs, to represent themselves, is the primary motivation for conducting this research.
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