3 Manufacturing Celebrity
Fame used to be a by-product. [Now] it’s like ‘What do you want to be when
you grow up?’ ‘Famous.’ ‘What for?’ ‘It doesn’t matter.’
(Pop diva Kylie Minogue, talking with BBC Radio 1’s Jo Whiley, 12 November
2002)
ORDINARY TALENT
How might one make the production of celebrity a little more predictable?
The most recent answer is to attempt to generate celebrity from scratch.
While celebrities themselves are increasingly exploring ways of controlling
their own representations (Whannel, 2002: 184), some sections of the
media production industries have found new and effective strategies for
controlling the images they produce.
This is not a new idea of course. Historically, the first instincts of the media
and entertainment industries have been towards vertical integration – taking
control of the whole process of the production, distribution and sale of their
products from start to finish. Consequently, the golden years of Hollywood are
littered with stories of discovery, where the dental nurse or waitress is snapped
up by the talent scout and offered a career in the movies, only to find themselves
burned out and abandoned years later. Within such narratives, the star is
the victim of a rapacious and careless industry in control of every aspect of their
existence. The popular music industry, too, has its own stories which demonstrate
that the industry has often valued its performers more for their market
appeal than for their musical abilities. The rock’n’roll boom of the 1950s and
early 1960s saw numerous young prospects being picked off the sidewalk for
their brooding good looks only to reveal in the studio that they couldn’t sing a
note. Over their histories, the media and entertainment industries have routinely
sought to find‘unspoiled’ fresh prospects they could‘discover’ and groom
for stardom. The commercial purpose behind this, of course, is to take control
of the individual’s career from the beginning and to contract for their services
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58  PRODUCTION
into the future as a means of limiting the cost and maximising the returns to
the original investor of the individual becoming a success. If, in some cases,
these individuals turned out to have no particular talents, that was not necessarily
a bad thing. What seems to have been more important was their determination
to become ‘somebody’ and to do what was necessary to achieve this
outcome. It is not hard to see how dealing with someone who was simply
determined to be famous might have been easier than dealing with someone
who had more subtle or specific goals and expressed preferences about the
means taken to achieve them.
Since the late 1990s, however, there has been a spectacular revival of the
media’s interest in manufacturing celebrity. Some sections of the media,
particularly commercial television, have discovered that rather than being
merely the end-user of celebrity, they can produce it themselves. Increasingly,
they have done this by using ‘ordinary’ people, with no special abilities and
achievements, as the ‘talent’ in their programmes (Turner, 2010). Their
celebrity is produced out of nothing, bypassing what we might think of as
the conventional conditions of entry (specialised training, or a history of
performance, for instance). Those who participate do not necessarily want
to be singers, or actors, or dancers – they just want to be on television.
These days it is clear that such a desire is actually quite widespread, as are
the prospects for its satisfaction. Frances Bonner (2003) suggests that it is
probably more common for people in the countries she examines (the UK
and Australia) to have been on television, either as a participant or contestant
or as a member of the live audience, than not. Her focus upon what she
calls ‘ordinary television’ – game shows, infotainment, reality television,
the less travelled formats for the television analyst but the quotidian mainstay
of the television schedule – leads her to argue that television is omnivorous
in its demand for ‘ordinary people’ to feature in its programming.
According to Bonner’s estimate, convincingly worked out in some detail,
British television would feature close to one quarter of a million ‘ordinary
people’ on screen per year, with over 20,000 having a speaking role (2003:
61–2).
Given the scale of the desire these figures reflect, it is not surprising that
many television formats – in particular, reality-based gameshows, talent
quests and docu-soaps – have oriented themselves towards satisfying it. In
an exceptional number of cases, reality TV formats have been commercially
successful. Internationally, Big Brother and Idol are among the most widely
adopted examples of these formats but there is a wealth of reality TV formats
that have attracted large audiences, both national and transnational,
as well as creating their own stable of personalities and stars: Survivor,
Airport, Airline, Driving School, What Not to Wear, Jersey Shore, The Hills
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Manufacturing Celebrity   59
and Keeping Up With The Kardashians are among them. For the media
organisations involved – the producers and the network – the celebrity they
manufacture for the contestants/subjects is not their primary objective: their
goal is to develop a viable programming initiative to sell to advertisers.
Celebrity is a profitable by-product, to be sure, but the producers have only
a limited commitment to trading on it once the programme has gone to air.
(For instance, the Big Brother producers must invest in successive waves of
housemates, each replacing the last, in order to promote each series.) They
know, however, celebrity’s importance in attracting participants in the first
place. For the subjects or contestants in reality TV programmes, even where
substantial cash prizes or career opportunities are to be won, celebrity is the
real prize that is on offer.
It is this phenomenon I want to discuss in the first part of this chapter.
In reference to reality TV programmes such as Big Brother, I want to
argue that these media producers have taken control of the economy of
celebrity by turning it into an outcome of a programming strategy. Among
the notable effects of this recasting of celebrity has been the producer’s
capture and containment of some of the core contradictions that structure
the relation between the celebrity and the entertainment industries. Most
crucially, they have contained the capacity (temporarily, at least) for damaging
conflicts of interest to arise. Since the construction of celebrity is
thoroughly incorporated into the programming format, any potentially
conflicting personal and commercial objectives (that is, those of the
celebrities-in-the-making, and those of the producers or networks) are
structurally accommodated to each other from the beginning. As a result,
these celebrities are especially dependent upon the programme that made
them visible in the first place as they have virtually no other platform
from which to address their audience.
Again, I realise this is not unprecedented and such patterns have occurred
in the film industry at frequent points in its history. But the value and appeal
of celebrity today seem to have radically empowered those media formats
that produce it. It is understandable, therefore, if commentators express
their concern about the long-term prospects of the temporary beneficiaries
of this process. Although the ‘ordinary person’ can use Big Brother to take
a shot at fame, something that was unlikely to be available to them through
any other means, they are still at the mercy of the system that creates them
and within which they have a very limited future. I don’t think it is easy to
be too categoric about this, however, and the examination of specific versions
of Big Brother can generate quite different accounts of the power
relations being played out. To run against the grain of the politics implied
by that comment, then, in the second part of this chapter, I discuss what
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may appear to be an inversion of the politics of ‘reality TV’: the construction
of a form of DIY celebrity, using personal websites, blogs and social
media as a means of constructing fame and trading upon it. This development
affects not only the ordinary person wishing to construct a public
persona for themselves, but also increasingly the established celebrity wishing
to change the means through which they negotiate the construction of
their persona with their audience.
‘REAL’ CELEBRITIES AND REALITY TV
As we have seen, the discourses that construct celebrity are contradictory.
According to them, celebrity is deserved or totally arbitrary: the recognition
of natural talent or just blind good luck. Audiences place individual
celebrities somewhere along a continuum that ranges from seeing them as
objects of desire or emulation to regarding them as spectacular freaks
worthy of derision. Mostly celebrities will attract one form of response
rather than the other (so Sarah Jessica Parker might attract more admiration
than, say, Jessica Simpson), but it is possible to attract both from
different constituencies – or even from the same constituency. (By this I
mean that the desire may incorporate an awareness of the cynicism behind
the process of production; for instance, I could see Lady Gaga’s followers
occupying this sort of knowing but celebratory position.) This discursive
contradiction is reflected in the paradoxical relationship between the
celebrity and their public. Celebrity is the product of a commercial process
but it is worth remembering that the public expression of popular
interest can operate, at times, as if it was entirely independent of this commercial
process. Sometimes no amount of publicity can generate public
interest, while at other times the public will reveal a mind of its own in its
reactions to a specific individual, no matter what the publicity machine
does. There is a tension between these two forces – the commercial industry
and the public will – and celebrity cannot be constructed or maintained
without both playing some part. In the first part of this chapter,
though, it is the arbitrariness – the constructedness – of celebrity that is
most pertinent to the focus on its fabrication ‘out of nothing’.
While television is the industry location I want to concentrate on here
it is first worth noting the significance of the music industry’s activities
over the last decade or two, starting with the successful development of
the Spice Girls. The Spice Girls seem to have been conceived, from the
start, as a brand rather than a band. Developed by producers with very
specific objectives in mind, they were the outcome of marketing plans
rather than a grassroots fan or performance base. Nevertheless, in my
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Manufacturing Celebrity   61
view, it is possible to explain their level of success in comparison to
other pre-fabricated bands of the time precisely because the individual
members were able to construct convincing celebrity identities for themselves.
Tempting though it is, now, to see them as the popular music
industry’s most elaborate expression of bad faith, I think a significant
component of their appeal to their audiences was both their explicit
acknowledgment of their commodification and their refusal to allow this
to de-legitimise them. The ‘cheekiness’ that trade-marked their media
presence was partly constituted by this combination of discourses of
pragmatism and feisty independence, which allowed them to perform,
convincingly, a knowing celebration of their own constructedness.
P. David Marshall (2000) makes a similar point in his discussion of The
Beatles’ success. According to him, The Beatles ‘trod the line between something
authentically wonderful and significant (fabulous) and something manufactured
and created by an industry (fabricated)’ (2000: 169).As Marshall had
pointed out earlier, in Celebrity and Power (1997), the fundamental discursive
opposition that structures achievement and celebrity in the music industry pits
authenticity against in-authenticity. The ‘true’ rock star is the romantic artist,
their music resisting the temptation to pander to commercial tastes in favour
of expressing the self. As I have noted earlier, there is a commercial reason for
emphasising the artistic integrity of the musician through discourses of authenticity,
of course – it attaches fans to the artist, not just the latest single or music
video, and thereby enhances the prospect of long-term careers (Weinstein,
1999). Despite this, and despite the continued currency of anti-commercial
discourses that attack the ersatz, the ‘sellout’ and the demands of the record
company, the music industry also has a long history of pre-fabricated bands.
The Monkees are the most lurid historical example, possibly because it was
widely reported that they did not play on their recording sessions and only one
of them had any real credibility as a musician in his later career (Michael
Nesmith), but there are plenty of other examples (Milli Vanilli, for instance).1
With The Beatles, Lennon and McCartney’s songwriting abilities and the credibility
that came from learning their trade in the red-light districts of Hamburg
provided the authenticity. The contrivance of their ‘look’ (the suits, the haircuts,
the stage-managed press conferences, the Svengali-like presence of Brian
Epstein) told us that they were being marketed as a product. Marshall argues
that The Beatles are the place where we first encounter a distinctively modern
take on fame. Their open manipulation of their public image might once have
generated a negative connotation, but Marshall suggests instead that – in the
case of The Beatles – the commodification of the musician was ‘no longer seen
as some form of corruption of artistic practice; rather it became part of the
artistic process’ (2000: 170).
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Marshall also notices how the members of The Beatles actively sought to
differentiate themselves as individuals. He describes their successful transition
from being identified with the band to being identified as individual
members of the band as a new form of authenticity, a ‘democratic celebration
of celebrity’ (ibid.: 174). Something like this influenced the representation
and self-presentation of the Spice Girls. It is possible to argue,
although possibly difficult to remember when faced with their subsequent
solo careers, that the Spice Girls, individually although in varied ways,
gave the lie to the assumption that those who are exploited by the entertainment
industries in this way are vacuous victims. Instead, they performed
convincingly as examples of how savvy and tough-minded
individuals can play the fame game, on the industry’s terms, and still win.
That, it seems to me, was the specific meaning of their championing of ‘Girl
Power’. ‘Girl Power’ was more convincing when performed as a collective
manifesto, however; its impact, even its relevance, disappears when we
look at the band members’ careers as individuals after the band dissolved.
In the long term, the Spice Girls’ lesson for the industry was not about how to
appropriate media power. Rather, it was a one-off demonstration of how
we might successfully manufacture celebrity for consumption by a mass
audience without attempting to disavow its inauthenticity.
None of the ‘brand-bands’ that followed the Spice Girls achieved an
equivalent status – either in terms of the successful construction of individual
identities for their members, or a cultural politics for the band, or in
terms of commercial success. Nevertheless, there is some truth in Naomi
Klein’s (2000) observation that the pre-fab brand-band – typified at that
time by N’Sync, All Saints and a whole raft of boy bands – has never been
so prominent a phenomenon as it became at the end of the 1990s (although
she may have been surprised by how long the boy band has survived – look
at the current celebrity of One Direction, for instance). In addition, Klein
suggests, ‘musicians have never before competed so aggressively with consumer
brands’ by setting up their own line of merchandise. Sean ‘Puffy’
Combs, she goes on, ‘has leveraged his celebrity as a rapper and record
producer into a magazine, several restaurants, a clothing label and a line of
foods’ (2001: 50). One of the outcomes of this trend – the branding of pop
bands – was its relocation to television in the early reality TV talent contest/
makeover hybrid, Popstars.
The Popstars format originated in New Zealand in 1999, before moving
to Australia, and then to the UK and the USA over 2000–2001. The programme
set out to construct a successful pop music group on television and
the strategies it developed towards this end are now highly familiar.
Hundreds of contestants were interviewed and their auditions filmed – and
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Manufacturing Celebrity   63
exploited – for a range of effects. Much of it was simply humiliating, with
bad performances eliciting caustic ‘private’ conversations between the
judges. Once the band members were chosen, the programme moved into a
second phase as it followed the ‘popstars’ through their grooming and
development right up to the release of their first recording. In each of the
countries where I followed its course (New Zealand, Australia, the UK, and
the USA), the popstars went on to form a band, release a single, and promote
it successfully. While the initial success of some of these singles was
extraordinary (the first UK and Australian singles, in particular, went to
number one immediately), none of the bands were able to repeat that initial
success or construct a continuing career. Typically, even those who remained
together as a unit2
found that they couldn’t sustain sufficient audience interest
in their music once they lost the public visibility generated by appearing
weekly on prime-time television.
As that outline of the format will have suggested, Popstars’ amalgam of
television genres exerted quite an influence on the make-up of the formats
which followed. The first phase of the format draws on the two competing
paradigms of the TV talent quest (that is, those searching for genuine talent
and those that set out to humiliate talentless contestants). Contestants are
of both kinds (talented and talentless) and provide the pleasures of both
formats in relatively equal proportions. (We can see such strategies still currently
employed in various ways through contemporary formats such as
Got Talent, Idol, and The Voice.) Since viewers are encouraged to follow
the contest and try to pick the likely winners (in some versions they can vote
for their preferred contestant), it also works like a game show. A docu-soap
style narrative helps to structure this part of the contest, too, using interviews
with family members and providing a certain amount of sentimental
back-story for the higher profile contestants. The second phase mixes the
makeover format with classic fly-on-the-wall reality television of the kind
that would be more thoroughly developed by Big Brother (which first
appeared in the Netherlands in 1999, with the UK version beginning in
2000), offering the appearance of the real and the everyday with the added
attraction of being set backstage in a glamorous world that is the epitome
of ‘cool’. (Indeed, the programme spends much of its time teaching these
contestants – and their audience – how to be ‘cool’.) In its later iterations,
the format has been applied to other industries or domains of celebrity –
Search for a Supermodel is one example – and to the media’s construction
of celebrity itself, with Fame Academy.
Popstars offered the opportunity of fame and success within a narrow
commercial framework: this is a prefab band, after all, so no matter how
well you sing you had better not be fat or homely. Furthermore, the band
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already had its first single and album chosen for it: no room for ‘musical
differences’ to arise here. Many professionals within the music industry
regarded it as an extraordinarily cynical exercise that offended all the principles
of artistic integrity and authenticity Marshall described as fundamental
to the sector. And although it may well have been to some extent
integrated into the economy of opportunity within the music industry, the
contractual arrangements it negotiated with its performers were in at least
some instances especially exploitative.3
For the television networks, however,
the show was an enormous ratings success. More importantly, it was
a ‘water cooler’ success, generating lots of talk and media interest. It created
considerable spin-off promotional opportunities such as shopping mall
appearances and television specials, as well as concert performances. For
particular sectors of the audience – teenage girls and young women –
Popstars was must-see TV that vigorously fed into their everyday lives.
(Notably, though, the novelty wore off with successive series.) For the celebrity
industry, it demonstrated the value of saturation television exposure for
short-term impact.
In Popstars, though, and for some of its imitators, there was still a connection
between talent, winning the contest, and the ensuing celebrity
(short-lived though the latter might be). Indeed, there are often indications
that many of the contestants were already working in the industry concerned
and using the programme as the chance for their ‘big break’. Big
Brother, still regarded as the ultimate pseudo-event, took us one step further
away from this connection. Like Popstars, Big Brother is also an
amalgam of a bunch of TV genres: the game-show, the lifestyle programme,
the make-over, the talk show, and the reality TV docu-soap. As I am sure
readers of this book will know, the format involves a cast of ‘ordinary
people’ who agree to take up residence in a house or apartment for a set
period during which every moment of their lives will be captured on camera.
Each week, they nominate fellow ‘housemates’ for eviction so that the
viewers may decide who stays and who leaves the house. The last housemate
standing wins a cash prize. Since it is usually stripped across the
week’s schedule in repeated timeslots, each new series is major entertainment
news. As a television event, it is big. To date it has been screened in
more than 70 countries, and created spin-offs such as Celebrity Big Brother
as well as many unofficial clones to date. Its aggregated audience would be
numbered in the billions. In Italy the first series attracted 69 per cent of the
national audience, and even in the US where it took a while to catch on
(and the cast threatened to walk out!), it eventually picked up 52 per cent
of the audience (Johnson-Woods, 2002: 1–2).4
The scheduling details vary
significantly across markets, so in some countries Big Brother is screened
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Manufacturing Celebrity   65
daily, in others three or four times a week. The regular episodes are often
supplemented by highlights packages or in some markets an additional late
night, ‘uncut’ or ‘adult viewing’ package (promising moments of nudity,
swearing and sexual activity). In most cases there is a weekly eviction episode
performed in front of a live audience. The website attached to the
series has become an increasingly important component of the Big Brother
event because of its interactivity: it has live camera feeds direct from the
Big Brother location, chat rooms, blogs, social media links, picture galleries,
highlights video, news and updates, gossip and merchandise, as well as
facilities for on-line voting on evictions and so on. In the Australian version,
the Big Brother house was in a theme park and the actual physical
site has remained a continuing attraction outside the production cycles.
Advertising is sold for the entire run of the series (in most cases several
months, although the ‘Celebrity’ versions tend to be much shorter – a week
in the UK for example) and is supported by lots of product placement. This
varies from delivering Pizza Hut pizzas to the housemates for a treat, to
simply providing the mop or the washing-up liquid.
The publicity and promotions potential of the format has proven to be
extraordinary: the programme can be promoted as a news event, as a
cultural phenomenon, as the launching pad for a raft of new celebrities,
as a contest to be played through SMS and social media, and, finally, as
high concept or special event television. As each housemate is evicted they
generate a fresh news cycle: their eviction may be cited on channel and
network news, they will be guests on talk and news magazine programmes,
exploited through channel, network, or sponsors’ promotions,
and some may even turn up as presenters in new programming ventures.
When each series is completed, the whole cast is processed through the
various network programme formats all over again, with retrospectives,
reunions, insider revelations and so on. Cross-promotion across television
networks, websites, newspapers, magazines and radio is fundamental.
Whenever it is scheduled, Big Brother generates a mini-boom in celebrity
content because of this increase in material and interconnected promotional
outlets, as well as its intrinsically controversial nature as a programming
innovation. Big Brother creates its own celebrity and thus
raises general interest in celebrities and their appeal, while also challenging
us to consider why people would volunteer to participate – as well as
why people want to watch. The news media have tended to deal with these
two impulses in a disingenuous manner: they shamelessly exploit the
celebrity gossip that Big Brother provides, while also soliciting comment
pieces which warn about the programme’s deleterious effect on ‘television
as we know it’, or its worrying implications for our society.
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Given such a production context, the Big Brother housemates are the
epitome of the fabricated celebrity. While they are cast for their likely contribution
to the overall performance and appeal of the programme, their
casting does not reflect the possession of particular professional talents or
abilities. Different countries have cast for different internal dynamics (in the
USA they cast for conflict, in Australia they have tended to go for community,
in Spain for sexuality), but most production companies have attempted
to avoid to be seen preferring people whose ultimate aim is to be an entertainer
of some kind.5
These attempts have not been entirely successful, but
the trend is for contestants to be ‘ordinary’ people without professional
self-presentation skills or a theatrical or media background. If it were not
for the fact that they have agreed to be on camera twenty-four hours a day,
seven days a week for several months, they could plausibly stand in for the
‘ordinary viewer’. The cash prize offered to the successful candidate is an
attraction, but the real prize is the chance to be on television for months.
Like those individuals Kylie Minogue refers to in this chapter’s epigraph,
these people want to be famous but most of them haven’t worked out what
for. Big Brother helps them to defer answering that question while making
major steps towards achieving their objective.
Why do the contestants participate? For the most part, they are not looking
for any special talents to be recognised: indeed, in many cases, they
display none. The answer to this question is actually the obvious one: the
contestants want to be on television long enough to be famous. Big Brother
can almost guarantee that. Perhaps the more difficult question is why these
people – having no special abilities to celebrate – should want to pursue
fame at all. Braudy’s discussion of fame is unusual (certainly for the period
in which he wrote it), in that he dwells approvingly on the undeserved character
of modern fame. Braudy regards the modern desire for fame as a
perfectly reasonable impulse and explains some of its attractions. First, he
points out that fame does more than offer us visibility; it offers a particularly
flattering kind of visibility in which ‘all blemishes are smoothed and
all wounds healed’. Fame is the achievement of a magical moment of perfection,
the end point of a process that restores ‘integrity and wholeness’ to the
representation of the self. Second, and more importantly, to be famous in
the arbitrary manner I am describing is especially validating for the individual:
‘To be famous for yourself, for what you are without talent or premeditation,
means you have come into your rightful inheritance’. Fame
becomes a ‘personal justification’ (Braudy, 1986: 7).
The desire for such personal validation has a long history. Nick Couldry
(2000a) refers to ‘the fantasy of being included in some way in major cultural
forms such as television or film’ as being related to what ‘Valerie
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Manufacturing Celebrity   67
Walkerdine summarises in historical terms as the fantasy of “getting on the
stage”’ (2000a: 55). Popular culture has for many years provided a legitimate
setting for that fantasy – from the boxing ring to the music hall and
vaudeville to television – especially for members of the working class.
Indeed, Couldry argues that among the attractions of this fantasy is its
inferred capacity to free the individual from their class placement: specifically,
they could escape their identification with the working class without
defecting to the middle class. On the other hand, there is the argument that
Skeggs and Wood (2012) make, which suggests that while the modes of
personal comportment being recommended through such reality TV genres
as makeover TV are clearly marked as middle class, the manner in which
working-class audiences actually engage with these television texts reveals
resistance to the imposition of these values, and even a defiant identification
with precisely that mode of performance which does not conform to
middle-class norms. There are resonances here with Andrew Ross’s (1989)
discussion of the function of popular culture which emphasised how many
popular cultural forms deliberately provoked respectable society into distaste
and condemnation. For the participants themselves, however, there is
merit in Couldry’s suggestion that the personal validation achieved through
appearing on these programmes might provide an opportunity for sidestepping
the normatising influence of class. Certainly, and while Bourdieu
would have despised the kind of celebrity we are discussing here (imagine
Bourdieu on Jade Goody, for instance), reality TV celebrity does seem to
constitute a new variety of social distinction, gained without treading any
of the conventional pathways. As a spectacular form of symbolic capital,
reality TV celebrity opens up an almost instantaneous route to the achievement
of a ‘social life that will be known and recognised, which will free you
from insignificance’ (Bourdieu, 1990: 196.)
Couldry (2003) explores similar territory in his discussion of the performance
of ‘self-disclosure’ through the media. He has quite a different take
on celebrity here, however, in that he relates it to what he calls the ‘myth of
the media centre’: the commonsense assumption that the media ‘speak for’
the centre of the social world. Access to the media therefore constitutes
access to the social centre and is thus empowering in a more generally social
sense than simply generating personal fame. Rather than an excess of narcissism,
or an obsession with fame, Couldry describes the motivation
behind the ordinary person’s preparedness to expose themselves on television
as the pursuit of personal access to a ‘central’ social space (2003: 116).
As such, it is an essentially political enfranchisement that is the object. The
participation he describes may be about utilising the symbolic power of the
media rather than an investment in celebrity itself. This has been an
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extremely influential and useful idea, and it seems particularly persuasive in
relation to the confessional talk show, the phenomenon Jane Shattuc deals
with in The Talking Cure (1997) and Joshua Gamson in Freaks Talk Back
(1998), but perhaps less so in relation to the participants of Big Brother.
Most of the early academic discussions of Big Brother, perhaps understandably
then, do not focus on such issues but instead concentrate first on
reality TV’s place in the history of television’s construction of ‘the real’
(Roscoe, 2001, for instance, or more substantially, Hill, 2002, and 2007). Jon
Dovey (2000) contextualises the historical shift in the relation between the
television camera and the real in this way. Once the camera was hidden and
determined not to interfere with the reality it depicted, implying the priority
of the pro-filmic events, of ‘the real’ over the representation. Now, however,
the camera captures events ‘that are only happening because the camera is
there’, implying the priority of the representation over ‘the real’. In reality TV,
in particular, from make-over programmes to Popstars, says Dovey,‘the entire
process is only happening because it is going to be on television’; that is, a
‘reality’ is constructed solely in order to produce a representation. For all
concerned, this is the blindingly obvious but nonetheless crucial and often
overlooked implication, that ‘without the fame-conferring gaze, there would
be no event worth filming, no reality’ (2000: 11).
Implicit here is the growing importance of the camera as a means of constituting
and validating everyday reality. Just as the fans at a sports event cheer
when they see their images come up on the big screens in the stadium, celebrating
their media presence, the circulation of images of the self via television has
become a means of legitimation. No longer consigned to the ‘hyperreal’ of
postmodernity, the media-tised image of the self has come to seem as if it is
among the promises of everyday existence. According to Frances Bonner’s
(2003) argument mentioned earlier, this is becoming an increasingly plausible
expectation for sections of the community. Inside the idea of reality TV is the
offer to display our everyday identities as a spectacle, as an experiment, as
entertainment – and television’s insatiable appetite for ordinary people to display
their identities ensures that the offer is made to an increasing number of
prospective participants. On the other hand, of course, the offer is made in a
highly selective manner; the contestants for Big Brother are chosen from many
thousands of applications and we do not know the criteria that determined the
selection process. Nonetheless, the term ‘reality TV’ sets out to eliminate the
distance between television and everyday existence, and the distance does seem
to be shrinking. To the many who participate in these programmes, who turn
up in the audiences of live programmes, and who race home to see if they
made it onto the television coverage of their favourite sporting event, everyday
life is at its most valid and real when it is visible on TV.
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With Big Brother, the celebrities in the making are explicitly disconnected
from discourses of the exceptional by the programme’s format. What audiences
see is the housemates’ ‘everyday’ behaviour, nothing more or less. Of
course, it is important to acknowledge that this was in itself a performance
(Roscoe, 2001); we still may not know how these people behave every day
when there are no cameras around. Nevertheless, among the attractions of
the programme was precisely this promise of witnessing ‘the everyday’.
Even the voyeuristic attractions of watching the housemates shower or have
sex – highly important to the promotion of the programme in most markets
but not particularly important to the viewers’ experience in the end (see
Hill, 2002) – are articulated to a narrative that has us observing these people
living their lives rather than performing a role. The magical discourses
that surround conventional celebrities operate as teasing provocations to
the demand for the revelation of the private. With Big Brother the reverse
is true: private revelations are offered as the opening move in a process that
turns these people into celebrities.
On the evidence of Big Brother’s consumption, this offer seems to have
been widely accepted, and audiences entered into a direct process of narrative
investment and identification. Such a process does not necessarily indicate
sympathy or that their identification was positive. There are plenty of
reasons to believe many viewers watched Big Brother from positions that
explicitly ‘dis-identified’ with these people (the comments on the websites
and social media would certainly indicate this). Many newspaper commentators
also recorded their failure to ‘get it’ – to understand the appeal of the
programme. Further, there seems to be an almost anthropological dimension
to the programme’s consumption by some sectors of the audience. In
Australia, where the housemates were overwhelmingly drawn from the
young, a steady growth in the over-55s audience suggests that this was an
opportunity to observe a cultural fraction that was something of a mystery
to this section of the audience. Little wonder that reality TV’s complicated
relation to the real has so dominated academic accounts.
The discourses of possibility that fuel the production and consumption of
celebrity generally seem to have been thoroughly cashed in through this
television format. If celebrity is increasingly possible as a career option; if its
achievement is increasingly recognised as a matter of luck; and if television’s
role in making celebrities visible to us has become a major part of its programming
strategies (i.e., through all kinds of programming from news to
Entertainment Tonight to Biography to Who Do You Think You Are?); then
it is perhaps not surprising that there are many people in the television audience
who want to take the option provided by Big Brother. If the ideologies
that inform celebrity in contemporary culture – the ideologies described by
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P. David Marshall as entirely complicit with democratic capitalism – are
fulfilling their function, the pursuit of celebrity as an objective rather than as
a by-product of personal activity is not surprising either. Public visibility per
se is offered as an achievement to emulate and desire; little wonder that it is
pursued with such tenacity and at some personal risk by a large number of
people. What Big Brother offers is precisely what such a desire creates: the
promise of media validation for just being who you are, every day.
TAKING CONTROL: DIY CELEBRITY
IN THE DIGITAL ERA
‘Why are they doing this, do you think?’ Coleridge asked. ‘Why do you think?
To get famous’. ‘Ah, yes, of course,’ said Coleridge. ‘Fame’. ‘Fame’, he thought,
‘the holy grail of a secular age’. The cruel and demanding deity that had replaced
God. The one thing. The only thing, it seemed to Coleridge, that mattered any
more. The great obsession, the all-encompassing national focus, which occupied
90 per cent of every newspaper and 100 per cent of every magazine. Not faith,
but fame. ‘Fame’, he murmured once more. ‘I hope they enjoy it’. ‘They won’t’,
Geraldine replied. (Ben Elton, Dead Famous, 2001: 242–3)
In 1996, among the more notorious sites accessible through the internet
was Washington DC web designer Jennifer Ringley’s ‘JenniCam’ site, which
uploaded new photos of Jenni’s bedroom every few minutes. The occasional
flashes of nudity helped to attract media attention to her site, and
Jenni became something of a celebrity (she eventually appeared as a guest
star in the TV series Diagnosis Murder – playing a webcam star). In the
first edition of this book, which was published in 2004, I spent some time
discussing the phenomenon of the many ‘cam-girls’ who appeared in
JenniCam’s wake. At that time, these sites featured live or recorded images
of the cam-girl host, as well as other material such as comments, poetry,
diaries, journals and so on. The cam-girls competed against each other to
attract subscribers and fans, and a lively critical subculture built up where
the cam-girls and their fans discussed the various tactics employed.
Discourses of authenticity, commercialisation, and exploitation – all familiar
from other areas of popular culture that are more thoroughly in the
capture of commercial industries – framed the debates within this critical
culture about what was acceptable behaviour from a cam-girl wishing to
attract visitors to her site.
At the time, the cam-girls seemed an extremely clear example of webbased
DIY celebrity, both in terms of the potential on offer and the dangers
to the individual that came with this potential (their proximity to pornography
sites, for instance, was one of the concerns) (Couldry, 2003: 129).
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Manufacturing Celebrity   71
Most notably, this form of celebrity had been established in ways that
were, largely, structurally independent of the mainstream media. In comparison
to their counterparts in television or popular music, the cam-girls’
integration into the mainstream media industries was initially minimal:
they created their own sites, they generated their own content, and they
designed their own performances of themselves. Surviving outside the
industrial structure that produces the television personality or the film star,
this was the cyberspace equivalent of a cottage industry. It was enabled by
the growth of the personal website as a form of personal expression as well
as a means of public self-presentation. For many observers (for example,
Cheung, 2000: 47), the personal website as it existed in the late 1990s was
an emancipatory medium, liberating the ordinary person from their constrained
role as merely the consumer of media products6
. Hence, there was
significant interest in this particular use of the capacities of the online
environment at the time.
Today, however, as cam-girl ethnographer Theresa Senft was told by one
informant, ‘cam girls are so 1998’ (2008: 11). If we want to examine the
potential for DIY celebrity online today, we need to look somewhere else.
The passing of the cam-girls had three primary causes: ‘the cultural saturation
of webcams beyond early adopters’, the ‘rapid rise of broadband penetration
around the world’, and the rise of ‘social networking services that
now easily support text, still images, audio and video’ (Senft, ibid.). Simply,
the capacities exploited by the cam-girls became more widely available, and
the widespread take-up of networked social media made much of what they
did so routine as to be unremarkable. (Once you have a camera in every
laptop, tablet and mobile phone, the webcam starts to lose its novelty!)
Consequently, the opportunities for all kinds of DIY celebrity multiplied
and diversified – creating what Senft describes as ‘micro-celebrity’: a ‘new
style of online performance that involves people in “amping up” their
popularity over the Web using technologies like video, blogs, and social
networking sites’ (ibid.: 25). In this section of the chapter, then, I want to
consider this next model of DIY celebrity, where certain techniques for
celebrity production have been appropriated by members of the public,
before turning to an examination of how similar capacities are enabling the
more traditional media celebrity to gain new kinds of control over the presentation
and circulation of their own public persona.
This is territory, I should add, that significantly blurs the distinction
between production and consumption which organises this book, and is all
the more interesting for that. Indeed, what the micro-celebrity demonstrates,
as James Bennett notes, is the fact that not only has the desire to be
famous become ‘increasingly ordinary’, but so have many of ‘the tools with
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which to become famous’ (2011: 179) – the techniques used to publicise the
self through personal websites, blogs, and social media such as Facebook,
MySpace and Twitter. The micro-celebrity engages in a form of self-branding
that is prosecuted through the presentation of their persona online: ‘microcelebrity
involves viewing friends or followers as a fan base; acknowledging
popularity as a goal; managing the fan base by using a variety of affiliative
techniques; and constructing an image of self than can be easily consumed
by others’ (Marwick and boyd, 2011: 141). P. David Marshall argues that
this development complicates the production/consumption division in a
particular way: rather than merely thinking of celebrity as the product of
representation, Marshall describes social media as forms of ‘presentational
media’ where we encounter an expression of the self that differs from those
enabled by previous media platforms because it is not ‘entirely interpersonal
in nature nor is it entirely highly mediated or representational’ (2010: 35).
This, he suggests, takes us into new territory for studies of the media: it
constitutes the partial displacement of a representational media system with
what he calls a ‘presentational culture’ (ibid.: 45) in which the individual
not only sees the public presentation of the self as a productive mode of
self-fashioning, but also grasps the opportunity of taking personal control
of that process.
Typically, the micro-celebrity operates within a relatively limited and
localised virtual space, drawing on small numbers of fans such as the followers
of a particular subcultural practice. Some, such as the celebrity
blogger Perez Hilton, have parlayed their modest DIY beginnings into a
major online presence that is of equivalent scale and structure to that of
more traditional media celebrities. Such a career trajectory actually ends
up compromising any claim one might want to make about ordinary people’s
capacity to generate an alternative form of celebrity through these
strategies; the more their small-scale DIY presence expands, and the more
followers it attracts, the more it comes to resemble those conventional
forms of fame to which it may once have claimed to provide an alternative
(Bennett, 2011: 181).
Nonetheless, the accessibility of the means of publicity and distribution now
available online does at least offer the possibility that ordinary people need no
longer deal with the traditional media gatekeepers before they are able to
attract public attention. Not only does this facilitate the small-scale activities
of the micro-celebrities, but it has also laid new pathways to the acquisition of
mainstream fame.As a result, the traditional media and cultural intermediaries
we discussed in Chapter 2 no longer totally control all the possibilities: there
are now some entry points over which both the prospective celebrity and their
audience have some control. The music industry, for instance, generates many
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Manufacturing Celebrity   73
examples of artists and bands whose careers were launched through exposure
on MySpace (Lilly Allen and the Arctic Monkeys are the usual ones mentioned
here), and there is the example of teenage star Justin Bieber, whose career
began as a result of the viral success of a video his mum posted on YouTube
(Rojek, 2012: 33). Of course, hoping to go viral on YouTube may be just as
arbitrary a process for acquiring fame as any that have preceded it, but the
power relations are now slightly different: significantly, the role of the consumer
has been strengthened. That is, Marwick and boyd have argued, the
public’s capacity to ‘exercise control’ over the process of celebritisation has
increased (2011: 155).
This, however, takes us into the second area I wanted to explore here – the
way in which the techniques of the micro-celebrity, themselves borrowed
from the publicity and promotions industries, have in turn been ‘borrowed
back’ by the ‘real’ celebrities – those who operate within mainstream commercial
media structures – in order to increase their control over their own
celebritisation. Given the comprehensiveness with which the media’s management
of celebrity controls the construction of a particular celebrity’s
presentation of their persona and their relation with their audience, it is not
surprising that it is now common for celebrities to use social media, and
particularly Twitter, not only as a means of communicating with their fans,
but also in order to regain some personal control over their relationship with
their public. Making use of social media in this way has become essential for
anyone working in the media and entertainment industries these days. For
some, such as Tom Cruise, the use of a Twitter feed is a relatively seamless
extension of an already existing official publicity strategy: he has acknowledged
he does not write his own tweets, for instance. As used by others,
however, such as Mariah Carey or Ashton Kutcher, Twitter offers something
new: a mode of direct, apparently unmediated, access to their fans. Kutcher,
in particular, seems to regard Twitter as something of a personal media playground
and appears unconcerned about surrendering his privacy, or that of
his former wife, Demi Moore (his 2009 posting of a photo of Moore bending
over in a white bikini became notorious). As a result, the pre-eminent objective
of the fan – to find out what the celebrity is ‘really’ like – appears to be
more categorically achieved through their engagement via Twitter rather
than any other platform. Celebrities read and respond to tweets from their
fans – sometimes directly, and sometimes simply by re-tweeting. They also
converse with each other – celebrity to celebrity—and allow their followers
to eavesdrop on that conversation. Of course, the belief that we are reading
an authentic comment actually uttered by our favourite celebrity may still be
illusory; it may still be written by an employee. That there is no way of
knowing this for sure appears to be no disincentive for the followers. Indeed,
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evaluating the message for its authenticity and provenance seems to simply
add interest to the game of interpreting the performance of celebrity in play.
Not only is this about authorship, but also, as Marwick and boyd note, ‘it is
the inability to tell what is strategic and what is accidental, as well as what
is truthful and what is not, that makes Twitter so enjoyable for fans’ (2011:
153). Hence the exorbitant numbers of followers collected by some of the
more high profile tweeters; these figures will date as soon as I write them,
but they give some idea of the scale we are talking about: Lady Gaga has 15
million followers on Twitter and Justin Bieber has 14 million. It is said that
the tweets sent by popular British media figure, Stephen Fry, are read by
more people than all the ‘printed copies of The Times, The Telegraph, The
Financial Times, The Guardian and The Independent combined’ (van
Krieken, 2012: 134).
The scale of this potential market is one of the reasons why, at the moment,
a professional engagement with Twitter is fundamental for virtually anyone
interested in managing their public persona. Politicians tweet relentlessly,
using the implied directness and authenticity of this communication channel
as, among other things, a means of counteracting common conceptions of the
politician as remote, inaccessible, and out of touch with the ordinary person;
this, in addition to touting policy initiatives and positions. We have also seen
the enhanced celebritisation of journalists7
through their participation on
Twitter. This is not necessarily only in order to prosecute their own personal
brand, however.Twitter has become core business as most news organisations
now require their journalists to maintain a Twitter account as a means of
attracting readers, listeners or viewers to their news services. For their part,
journalists are finding Twitter a valuable news source, as well as a means of
building a public profile for a professional persona that is in some respects
independent of their employer. The Twitter-led celebritisation of the journalist
constitutes the conclusion of a long-term trend towards the personalisation
of news: this trend has taken us from a world in which news stories were
more credible without a byline (thus signifying their total objectivity), to a
world in which the journalist has become part of the advertising pitch, as well
as a form of authorisation, for the story.
Not only does the celebrity use social media to take personal control of
their public presentation in the way these examples suggest, but they also use
them to take advantage of unmediated communication with their fans. The
intention behind this latter objective may be just as strategic as any other
mode of image management, of course: some celebrities clearly see Twitter
as offering them their own dedicated media channel, through which they can
shape what the rest of the media say about them, as well as determining
what their fans – most importantly – believe about them. Anthea Taylor
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Manufacturing Celebrity   75
(2013) has discussed ‘celebrity feminist’ Naomi Wolf’s deployment of Twitter
as a means of shaping the reception of her most recent, and poorly reviewed,
book, Vagina. Taylor shows how Wolf has used Twitter to disseminate the
positive accounts of her book, while blanking out the negatives, retweeting
only the positive feedback she receives (including from other celebrity admirers
such as Courtney Love).
Another dimension to this is that, for some celebrities, Twitter seems to
offer an opportunity to bypass even their own agents and public relations
staff, breaking free of corporate image-management in order to gain the
reward of direct communication with their fans, as well as some useful
street-cred as a celebrity who has ‘bucked the system’ and undermined the
publicity process by speaking honestly and directly to their fans. A risky
tactic, because it implicitly demands that at least some of the content of the
tweets should run against the grain of the more corporatised and established
persona, and therefore may undermine the legitimacy of that persona.
Of course, there would be little point in doing this at all if there was
nothing at least slightly surprising about these messages. As a result, there
are plenty of instances of tweets or comments on Facebook pages which
have embarrassed those charged with managing the celebrity-commodity’s
fragile public persona – even though, at the same time, they may well have
added an interesting new dimension to the celebrity’s relationship with
their fans. Nonetheless, in celebrity news today, one of the most commonly
cited signs of a celebrity caving in to stress or exhibiting signs of mental
disturbance is the posting or tweeting of inappropriate or unusually candid
comments about their private lives. A recent example of this was the media
coverage of Whitney Houston’s death.
Such activity inevitably reduces the distance between the celebrity and
their audience. In an extremely useful article on celebrity practice and
Twitter, upon which I have drawn repeatedly in this section, Marwick
and boyd contend that socially networked media has fundamentally
changed celebrity culture:
Gossip websites, fan sites and blogs provide a plethora of new locations for the
circulation and creation of celebrity, moving between user-generated content
and the mainstream media. The fragmented media landscape has created a shift
in traditional understanding of ‘celebrity management’ from a highly controlled
and regulated institutional model to one in which performers and personalities
actively address and interact with fans. (2011: 140)
They go on to describe the consequent change as ‘structural’, in that ‘it
complicates the locations of power, the avenues of access, and the management
of the celebrity-commodity’ by the media industries (ibid.: 142).
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The aspect that is most affected by these new developments, of course, is the
nature of the para-social relation between the fan and the celebrity.
Communicating via Twitter or Facebook, fans now can actually engage in a
visible and public exchange with their favourite celebrity; they can receive
responses to their questions or comments. Fans can also attract some celebrity
to themselves with repeated interactions over time. Through this expanded
domain of interactivity, there are now substantial elements of this para-social
relationship which no longer look like the simulation of a conventionally
social relationship at all. This is far from being a categoric shift, of course, and
much of the interactivity we have been describing could indeed be regarded as
simply the relocation of traditional strategies of marketing and publicity onto
another platform of distribution. This is why Marwick and boyd are right to
describe the current situation in terms of how ‘complicated’ the structure of
relations has now become. However, it does seem that the capacities for direct
interaction that social media generate between the fans and the celebrity are
marked by enhanced levels of familiarity, disclosure, responsiveness, and possibly
even of sincerity (Marwick and boyd, 2011: 149).
That said, however, Marwick and boyd are quick to point out that while
Twitter does to some extent bring famous people and fans “closer” together, …
it does not equalize their status’ (ibid.: 155); as indeed the fans seem to
acknowledge through the manner of their interaction, the power differentials
may have shifted, but they have not gone away. Rojek puts it this way:
The essence of the star is to be out of the reach of ordinary people … For all
the inside dope, the tales of chance meetings, the bits and bobs from Web chat
rooms that afford fans the secrets and low-down on celebrity culture, the balance
of power in information and opinion shaping is overwhelmingly in the
hands of the celebrity and the adjoining PR-Media hub. (2001:124)
It is easy to overstate the significance and extent of the increasing power of the
consumer/fan, and so it is worth noting how little the overarching patterns of
economic, cultural and political power have changed – notwithstanding the
possibility that the changes we are witnessing now are indeed structural.
Similarly, for those who take up the challenge of constructing their own DIY
celebrity online; they are reminded that‘practising celebrity’ and‘having celebrity
status are different’ (Marwick and boyd, 2011: 156). This raises questions
about the issue of scale, about whether we need to make very different arguments
about the function of a niche presence in a fragmented mediascape than
those we would make about a more traditionally mass-mediated presence. I
think that there is a genuine question about whether the online celebrity we
have talked about as a micro-celebrity is in fact the same, in most important
respects, as a mass media celebrity.
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Manufacturing Celebrity   77
This is another area of contemporary media experience where improved
access or improved consumer choice has been equated with a process of
democratisation, even in relation to such an apparently hierarchical context
as the production of celebrity. Notwithstanding a growing body of evidence
which challenges such an equation (Hindman, 2009; Turner, 2010), the link
so often made between the affordances of new media and the proposal of
an intrinsically democratising empowerment is still around, and it is that
issue we will address in the following chapter.
NOTES
1	 The Monkees were made for television, though, not the music industry. Television
was also the medium for another early, but more honest, example of the fabrication
of the star. Scottish singer, Sheena Easton, was the subject of a British television
documentary that set out to examine if it was possible to manufacture a
successful pop star and which ended by launching her on an unexpectedly
lengthy career.
2	 In the first Australian programme, one of the successful contestants dropped out
almost immediately after she was chosen – well before the conclusion of the
programme. The producers encouraged the media to canvass rumours that she
had stolen from one of her colleagues, but other industry rumours suggested that
she was not prepared to sign a contract that would have greatly restricted her
earning capacity and autonomy for a number of years.
3	 In the Australian example, members of the first Popstars band, Bardot, have lent
tacit assent to a report that the percentage of their total earnings, which went to the
television production company, Screentime, could have been as high as 60 per cent.
4	 Toni Johnson-Woods goes through some of the early variations of format around
the world (length, voting procedures and so on) in her Big Bother (2002). A full
list of the series in the various countries to date, as well as access to the official
websites is accessible through the Endemol Big Brother website at www.big-
brother.nl.
5	 There are some variations on this. In the UK and Australia, producers were keen
to play down any previous media experience their housemates might have had in
order to emphasise their ordinariness and thus to make more spectacular their
eventual transition to media celebrities. However, in some European versions, in
France for instance, there was a deliberate attempt to cast people with experience
in the sex industries – dancers, strippers, even prostitutes – in order to ensure a
higher likelihood of on-screen sexual activities.
6	 There is a similar take on the phenomenon, as ‘domestic webcams’, in an interesting
piece by Andreas Kitzmann from around the same period, 1999.
7	 I am indebted to Anthea Taylor for drawing my attention to this point.
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