Celebrity Gossip and Its Impact

I believe the power of gossips and rumors over celebrity crisis management is an important topic to discuss because the emergence of communication technology development has drastically changed the way we manage our relationships (Ben-Ze’ev, 2004) and reputation (Solove, 2007). Serving as a platform for mass media as well as individual representation, web 2.0 has empowered new forms of information, including celebrity gossip. This emergence also created challenges for crisis managers to control the harmful information being disseminated as the courses of gossips have become much denser (Beer & Penfold-Mounce, 2009).

I found Ortner’s article very informative because it formulated the knowledge regarding celebrity gossip by defining celebrity gossip and analyzing the challenges and opportunities it poses to the celebrity. The article sorted celebrity gossips into five categories with different sub-categories, including sex (sexual orientation, sexual preferences and unconventionalities, cheating/affairs and sex tapes/nude photos), drugs, relationships (new relationships, engagement and marriages, pregnancy, children and other family, failing relationships, failed relationships and fake relationships), behavior and character (acting in an inappropriate way, plastic surgery, having issues with weight, celebrity feud, being an attention-seeker, dark secrets and oddities) and behind-the-scenes. Ortner mentioned that nowadays, for the media, bad news is considered good news as it is much more appealing to the audience. Thus, as a lot of celebrities “depending on gossip and its power to sell products and images” (Birchall, 2006; Fortunati, 2009), Ortner suggested crisis managers to practice evaluation of the gossip by using Solove (2007)’s assessment, asking questions such as “who is making the disclosure,” “is the disclosure made to the appropriate audience,” and “is the purpose behind the disclosure one we should encourage or discourage.”

On the other hand, Beer’s and Penfold-Mounce’s article approached the topic by considering celebrities “mobile and contingent, rather than fixed and stable;” thus, they proposed approaches that can accommodate this mobility. Suggesting that celebrity is now perhaps “the defining aspect of contemporary popular culture” and viewing celebrity gossip as a process of “moving and transforming through a media environment,” the two authors depicted from Ang (1985)’s “melodramatic imagination” theory to proposed a “new melodramatic imagination” understanding of the power of gossip over a celebrity’s career. Using Miley Cyrus as a case study, they argued that by being a byproduct of the new melodramatic imagination, the public is now a partner in assembling the content; thus, controlling the narratives of both sides would be the key to celebrity crisis communication.

Moreover, Fairclough (2008) claimed that nowadays, “celebrities are no longer perceived as primarily or necessarily figures of aspiration, but as characters to judge and deride.” Consequently, she observed a “bitch culture,” in which gossip bloggers play the roles of both the “producer” and “consumer” of the celebrity by deconstructing a celebrity’s image, at the same time contributing to, and sometimes re-shaping, the celebrity’s cultural impact. Additionally, in this “bitch culture,” the boundary between negative and positive meaning of the word “bitch” has almost dissolved as a lot of celebrities have built a “bitch” reputation to attract audiences. In other words, “bitch culture” has become embedded into the typical paradigms of celebrity mediation.

Reference

1.      Beer, D., & Penfold-Mounce, R. (2009). Celebrity gossip and the new melodramatic imagination. Sociological Research Online, 14(2), 2.

2.      Fairclough, K. (2008). Fame is a losing game: Celebrity gossip blogging, bitch culture and postfeminism. Genders (48).

3.      Ortner, H. (2013). Not so blind items: Anonymous celebrity gossip exposed. Retrieved from http://web.mit.edu/comm-forum/mit8/papers/Ortner_MIT8_Blind_Items.pdf