The exponential speed in which technologies have developed throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries has prompted significant changes in the role celebrities play in society, and in the ways audiences engage and interact with them. It is through our interaction with famous figures via these mediated encounters that they come to hold meaning and value, for us and for our culture. We will emphasize the central role of the media and communications technologies and their particular affordances, to the manufacture, proliferation, and democratization of fame and celebrity. So we take a closer look at the development of media technologies, from newspapers, photography, and early fan magazines through to radio and television and including contemporary digital platforms such as Twitter, Instagram, and YouTube, in order to understand how each new advance in media molds the meaning of celebrity within popular culture at that particular historical moment. We will also consider how these evolving technologies interact with, shape, and are shaped by the changing industrial conditions around the production of fame.
While many elements of celebrity—who becomes one and why, how it is produced—have remained surprisingly constant over the years, it is also crucial to pay attention to how historical context shapes visibility and stardom. Evolving attitudes about race, gender, appropriate public behavior, sex and sexuality, and about authority and power all contribute to who does and does not gain celebrity status in different historical eras. What has been condemned as celebrity behavior in one era—say, having a child out of wedlock—barely raises an eyebrow in another.
Celebrity culture is a huge and profitable industry in the United States. It also plays a major role in constituting who we are, and what we hope for and dream about. And celebrity culture has a history. However evanescent and trivial particular celebrities and their triumphs and tragedies may be over the years, this media juggernaut, and what lies in its wake, is not immaterial. We need to appreciate its evolution, its industrial production, and its multiple effects, especially now, when celebrity culture has its grip on nearly every aspect of American life.
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Theories of Celebrity
Why, exactly, do we have celebrities and, now, so many of them? What needs do they fulfill, in our culture and our economy, even in our politics? But, also, what needs do they fill in us? Why do we as individuals pay attention to them, talk about them, adulate them, or, alternatively, hate them? What pleasures do they offer us and how has that contributed to the sheer numbers of celebrities, including “everyday people,” who have become famous, especially in the twenty-first century? How are we to think about and make sense of this phenomenon? Here we address these questions, examining the work of scholars who have considered both the broader sociological and historical explanations for the rise of celebrity and the more individual and psychological analyses of our engagement with people we will never meet or know. And it is important to emphasize that many of these theories are not mutually exclusive, but can work together to help us appreciate why this has become such a salient feature of modern life.
The Importance of the Audience
As previously noted, the rise of celebrity is made possible through the individual’s relationship to a mass audience, a public. The role of the audience is, therefore, crucial in the production and maintenance of fame. Indeed, as P. David Marshall argues, it is the public, the celebrity’s “followers,” who empower the construction of celebrity itself.1 “The historical emergence of the celebrity sign,” Marshall points out, “coincides and correlates with the rise of the audience as a social category,” adding that “Celebrity is an acknowledgement of the public’s power.”2 It is the attention of the public, our fascination and adulation, which make celebrity as a phenomenon possible. So at the heart of celebrity culture was, and is, a contradiction. Celebrities are seen as unique and elevated people, above the masses, yet are absolutely dependent on the good will and admiration of those masses for ongoing recognition and success. Thus, the twin pulls on our desire that celebrities be special and transcendent yet also regular people and “just like us.”
Francesco Alberoni offers similar observations about the power of the audience, suggesting that stars, despite their influence and success, are in fact powerless, at the mercy of the public. It is the public’s judgment of the famous that allows the elite to maintain their position. One of the ways in which this judgment functions is through the public’s perpetual affirmation and reaffirmation of social codes vis-à-vis celebrity actors. Celebrities, Alberoni notes, play a critical role in maintaining social standards and cohesion in large-scale society. As regularly (sometimes constantly) “observable” and “knowable” individuals, celebrities are available to be evaluated, loved, or criticized by their audience.3 The lives of celebrities, Alberoni writes, especially their social relationships, can be “a benchmark for positive or negative evaluation” by us, and a source both of identification and a projection of the needs of a mass audience. They are also “a living testimony to the possibility of achieving a rise in personal status.”4
Celebrities and Presentation of Self
The connection between celebrity and fan is a symbiotic relationship, fulfilling mutual needs and offering benefits to both. It builds on a deep and fundamental aspect of everyday interaction between people: when we engage with others, especially in public, it is a performance. We don’t often think of our interactions this way, as we like to think of ourselves as genuine, as not faking it or putting on a role. But in each culture there are rules about how to perform—in the classroom, at work, in a restaurant, even bumping into a friend on the street—that we learn in unspoken ways starting in childhood. And since most of us want to be liked, to be thought of as an admirable and attractive person, we try to conform to these rules and not violate them.
These rules form the foundation, the building blocks, of successful celebrity. So to understand what makes some stars admirable and others not, what makes some seem genuine and others fake and manufactured, we need to first review how performance in everyday life affects who we like, respect, even love, and who we don’t.
We all know that feeling of sitting in a restaurant or bar, say, and the person at the next table is talking too loud, bragging, acting like a know-it-all, and being obnoxious to the wait staff: we think right away, “what a jerk” (or something more unprintable). The person has transgressed the taken-for-granted mode of performance we have come to see as acceptable; the impression he gives off undermines the impression he is seeking to give. Anyone who has worked in retail, or a restaurant, knows there are often very specific rules about how to perform—what to say, how to say it—with the customers. Even walking across, say a campus, there are different modes of greeting for those you know only slightly versus those with whom you are very close, and if you mix them up, your performance seems odd.
So like us, but even more so, stars and their handlers need to devise and preserve a public persona that seems authentic and likeable. The increasing emphasis in our media-saturated culture and digital environments for all of us to craft effective, convincing performances, while stars seek to seem genuine and not manufactured, has led scholars analyzing celebrity culture to turn to the groundbreaking work of the sociologist Erving Goffman in his 1959 book The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life.5 Unpacking and revealing these often unspoken yet precise rules of how we present ourselves to others was at the core of his book. Goffman examined the sociology of how people present themselves, and the nature of interpersonal interaction and influence.6 This work has become foundational to our understanding of celebrity performance and culture.
To conduct his study, Goffman traveled to a most unlikely research locale, the remote Shetland Islands off the northeast coast of Scotland, and observed, often in minute detail, the face-to-face interactions of the people there. His major insight was to view human interactions in theatrical terms, through a dramaturgical lens, noting how all people must perform in everyday life, to present a convincing, idealized image of ourselves. People can either perform their identity sincerely or with cynicism (not truly meaning what we say), or flip back and forth between the two. And a person tends to “conceal or underplay those activities, facts, and motives which are incompatible with an idealized version of [self].”7
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