Week Eight: Celebrity Culture

Source: Click.

Professor David Marshall's guest lecture this week was quite an illuminating take on globalisation in terms of 'celebrity culture'. Examples included Prince Harry's leaked photographs and Catherine Zeta-Jones' anger appearing in paparazzi pictures. I was incredibly interested in the idea he introduced about private and public persona, and how the line has become finer and much more blurred with converging technologies.

Marshall (2008, p.498) talks about how it is personalities that the public are interested in, and personalities that are being bought and enjoyed. Marshall also discusses that new media are making possible what was thought impossible about fifty years ago. Media input has become more democratic, and the humiliating, unexplainable acts by celebrities are able to be posted, reported, broadcast and digested by audiences almost within the hour, within even minutes of occurring. 

Source: Click.

I personally do not understand this boom in 'celebrity culture'. and I barely care; especially when the celebrities involved have not earned their media coverage as others have. Celebrities are human and they are free to make their mistakes; but I don't support these mistakes splashed across covers of magazines and in big, bold headline font, by people paid to do it and apparently frame this as 'news'.

More recently people tend to explode with their media coverage; One Direction and individuals associated with Twilight come to mind. I have found that people either care religiously or not at all; both extreme polar opposites. There's the few people in the middle, but most tend to be one or the other.

Are your own experiences something like this? I'm interested to hear what you think!

Marshall, D, 2008, The Specular Economy, Society. Vol. 47.

Week Six: 'Alternative Media'?

Source: Click

What I think is the issue with people discussing Al Jazzera is that people are treating the programs and its content like it's 'alternative' to the Western media. Hence our problem again; we're still in the mindset of 'us' and 'them' in regards to the Middle East.

All media is subjective. All topic matter is subjective, and from whatever region is subjective. But we're still being steered in the direction of what is thought to be 'appropriate' news matter. We hear of shopping controversies on shows like A Current Affair that are not really news - but these stories are fast becoming the norm. Since when are we to absolutely judge television and its content?

There are even channels like SBS here in Australia that provide news from multiple countries and languages; Greek, Italian, Indian, Lebanese, the list goes on. Could these programs be judged as absolutely?

As Sun points out (2002, p.119), many diasporic groups in the contemporary global context use the Internet for community-building. Does this not apply to television programs? How can building a sense of community, for those who belong to a different country, be a bad thing?

And this is where another gap emerges, the 'race' gap. Even in trying to maintain all communities fairly, there will sadly be no room to deplete racism. Paradigms are difficult to shift for most people, and the one of race doesn't seem to be vanishing soon enough.

Sources:
Sun, W 2002, ‘Fantasizing the homeland, the internet, memory and exilic longings’, Leaving China: media, migration, and transnational imagination, Rowan & Littlefield, Lanham, Md., pp. 113–36.