Graeme Turner on celebrity and Princess Diana

Next Wednesday we're going to be looking at the rise of celebrity coverage and the subsequent response of media theorists (and journalists) to that rise.

We'll look at the whole debate over dumbing down. Many traditional press watchers argue that increasing celebrity coverage (part of larger trends - tabloidisation and the the rise of infotainment) has led to a dumbing down of the news media and, by extension, the public that consumes it.

We'll also look at some ideas from the growing area of celebrity studies - the efforts by different theorists to define celebrity and to explain/analyse its increasing hold over the public...

If you dip into celebrity studies, you'll learn that Princess Diana, in particular her death and the public reaction to it, is a key case study for media theorists who want to explain what celebrity is and how it's changing/changed our culture.

If you want a taster, try 'Diana and The Cult of Celebrity', a recent web forum hosted on the Encyclopedia Britannica blog. Held to mark the tenth anniversary of Diana's death, it features various mini-essays by journalists, academics and theorists on royalty and celebrity.

One essay that's worth a look is 'Diana and the Celebrity Culture We Enjoy' by Graeme Turner, who's a professor of Cultural Studies at the University of Queensland, Australia and author of Understanding Celebrity, which is worth looking at if you're interested in this subject. (The library has a couple of copies).

Turner's essay for the EB forum introduces some of the ideas he develops in more detail in his book. Here's a couple of quotes from Turner's essay:

"Interest in celebrity is driven by the desire to find out what these prominent people are really like. For the celebrity to feed that desire, there has to be more than just a catalogue of successful professional activities – hit movies, successful albums or a TV show. There must also be some element of an invitation to investigate their private life: a hint at the existence of another, usually more ordinary and familiar, persona beneath the public face. One of the defining features of celebrity, then, is the capacity to sustain interest in their private life. When the audience for a prominent person becomes more interested in their private life than in the activities which made them prominent in the first place, then that person has become a celebrity"

"There has been plenty written by academics about the way that celebrities such as Diana provide opportunities for people to do what has been called ‘life work’: that is, to think about their own behaviour, ethics, and relationships through a continuing engagement with the narrative of their favourite celebrity’s life. Others have pointed to the usefulness of celebrity gossip as a form of common social currency in communities where personal connections are reduced or attenuated. Still more have pointed to the changing structure of communities today, where social networks seem to be less cohesive and where the circle of friends and relations may well have shrunk as the extended family becomes a less common component of everyday life. In all of these accounts, the celebrity becomes a kind of proxy for earlier and now less available forms of social relations."

Turner goes on to talk about the fact that celebrities are, in some sense, socially useful to the people who consume endless coverage about them and describes the connection some feel with celebs as a 'para-social relationship'. This isn't the same as a relationship with a friend you can phone up, but it does have some sort of reality and is invested with real emotions.The essay's worth a look if you want a quick intro to some of the ideas we'll talk about on Wednesday.

(BTW - the pic is from EB's forum page - where you can find the credits)