Micro-Celebrity or Obsessed?
During the third week of class we discussed the topic of celebrity in social media. Since then, I have been applying the idea of impression management and Marwick & Boyd’s idea of micro-celebrity while using social media, especially Twitter. Impression Management is defined by Goffman as, “adjusting to perceptions of audience judgement.” When people are online, they can be whoever they want to be with the choice of anonymity. Some people who cannot truly be who they want to be in person, can be that person online because that person is safe behind a computer screen in the comfort of their own home. I met a friend at my first day at Rutgers and like what is common these days, we exchanged our numbers, instagrams, facebooks, twitters, and tumblrs. When I looked at this new friend’s instagram account later on, I saw that he was getting hundreds of likes on all his photos and that he had thousands of followers. I wondered how someone just as ordinary as me could get so many likes and followers and be such a “micro-celebrity” on social media. It turns out that he was using special tags that attracted random followers and generated likes. It seems today that everything is all about the likes and becoming widely recognized and well-known; for only tweeting average-Joe tweet and normal everyday pictures.
People want to be seen in a certain light, and social media is the perfect setting for such. I would like to briefly mention Sarachan’s ideas of studium and punctum. Studium refers to the “description of the picture” (Sarachan p. 52), and punctum refers to “what strikes you about the photo at first glance” (Sarachan p. 52). Social media users can use these two ideas to create and develop the perfect profile picture. The user can be seen how they want to be seen and the viewer of the photo, in addition, gets to see the best side of the person, like an art showcase.
In regards to micro-celebrity, Marwick & Boyd define it as, “a mindset and set of practices in which audience is viewed as a fan base; popularity is maintained through ongoing fan management; and self-presentation is carefully constructed to be consumed by others” (M&B p. 140). If you put the two together, you have today’s social media society.
Personally, I have never tweeted at celebrities or participated in scams to get a celebrity or a famous person to favorite a tweet. I am not interested in celebrities’ lives that much. But I have met die-hard fans in college who obsessively tweet at and try to get celebrities to reply to their tweets. A friend of mine has tweeted celebrities such as Demi Lovato, Ariana Grande, and Selena Gomez hundreds of times just so that he could get a simple response acknowledging the tweet and, in turn, his presence. Marwick & Boyd mention the idea that, “the performance of celebrities interacting with no thought of fans, press, or managers on Twitter is actually managed interaction that creates the perception of intimacy” (M&B p. 152). Decades ago before the whole internet became what it is today, people valued and watched celebrities from afar. They were, for the most part, untouchable. Now, celebrities can use social media to connect with their fans. Marwick & Boyd write that, “part of the appeal of Twitter, as we will discuss, is the perception of direct access to a famous person, particularly ‘insider’ information, first-person pictures, and opinionated statements” (M&B 142). Even if it’s not the celebrities, persay, it is their social media gurus and PR agents who are replying and favoriting tweets and tweeting personal things, fans can feel an intimate connection with the celebrity.
I am aware that here are many arguments surrounding whether or not the internet and social media trying to ruin our connections and makes us feel alone even when we’re all together in the same room. I believe that although some people go to extremes and end up becoming obsessed with celebrities and social media and getting that one person to notice them or their tweet or their instagram post, and that more often than not, people soon morph into who they are on social media, we are more connected to each other than ever before. Are there things that we may have to sacrifice? Will certain things that were not even thought about and imagined become norms? Quite possibly. It is hard to decipher whether or not social media can open up today’s members of society to a new word of self-expression to eventually create a society that accepts all, or whether we will become more obsessed and isolated from each other in person. But at the moment, tweeting Justin Bieber about how much you love his pelvic thrusts and smolders in his new video cannot do much damage on the world, can it?
Works Cited
Sarachan, J. (2010). 5. In Profile Picture, Right Here, Right Now.
Marwick, A., & Boyd, D. (2010). To See and Be Seen: Celebrity Practice on Twitter. In Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies (p. 21). Sage Publications.