Chan Ho Ming 10482943 Blog Post 2
Marwick, A. & boyd, d. (2011). To See and Be Seen: Celebrity Practice on Twitter. Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies, 17(2), 139–158.
How Far is Too Far
In Marwick and Boyd’s To See and Be Seen, they harp very heavily on the issue of fans must be having “equal status to succeed”, referring to the Twitter microblog being the engine of pulling fans and celebrity together. Their standpoint is not exactly true in that fans basically do look up to their idols for things that they admire and therefore, it is based on this difference in status that makes the celebrity business a marketable one.
Marwick and Boyd argue that celebrity is a theory which based on ‘practice’ rather than a binary connotation when used as a noun. This might be stretching the epistemology a bit because celebrity encompasses everything that is associated with it. By narrowing it down to a practice, it takes away the originally intended meaning of celebrity. In its original sense, it carries something above and beyond the ordinariness. When you put the action verb ‘practice’ as a performance, then everything by insinuation can be ‘created’ as a practice. Then where do we put naturally gifted people like Marilyn Monroe? Can we then ‘practice’ Marilyn Monroe and make whoever into another one like cloning?
Granted Twitter's do bring fans and their celebrities closer by means of direct messaging, but DMs need to be maintained constantly and continuously. All these require a tremendous amount of time and efforts. Mariah Carey is successful in creating a ‘personal touch’ by answering all her fan mails, but one may start wondering how much of that is authentic and sincere? Further, is it really her own hand that does the reply? Marwick and Boyd assert that people do not really care if they are real or not and this is presumptuous. In this parasocial dynamics, the ‘fake’ intimacy will gradually be uncovered and frowned upon. Doing microblog is not the same as watching their celebrities portraying certain characters in a movie. Fans can make this difference. Authenticity and sincerity do matter.
Fans do care about relationships between themselves and their idols. Twitter's definitely can perform this function of connecting them with their celebrities. However, in doing so, there is a price to pay. As the shroud of mystique about their celebrities is being peeled away, how far is too far if social media in the end do more damage than good in advancing the popularity of stardom? George Clooney and Angelina Jolie must have a point.
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