3 paragraphs

3 paragraphs for group paper 1st draft


American society is a society of immigrants, a group of people displaced from their home. This led to a mass experience of feeling lonely and displaced. Hollywood films served as the form of entertainment which created a 'cult of celebrity'. Film actors performed to an audience of the masses. Their personality was a home with only windows that looked out on the world with no door by which audiences could enter. A 'parasocial' relationship between audience and celebrity was formed through the illusion of face-to-face communication (Horton & Wohl 1956). As Walter Benjamin wrote in 1936 accompanying the cult of celebrity was the cult of audience in which individuals began to see themselves as a collective group of media consumers. Fans related with Hollywood celebrities through attempting to unveil the celeb, consuming information about their private lives and writing fan letters. (MEGAN)

"The celebrity is a person who is well known for his well-knownness" wrote Daniel Boorstin in 1962. Enter the internet age and we find a shift from media consumers to media producers, the viewer changes to user, and a shifting in mediation of self occurs. Micro-celebrity arises in the YouTube era of user-created content and viral videos. Andy Warhol stated that everyone will have 15 minutes of fame. The internet displaces celebrity from the notion of time to networks, “fame is no longer about getting 15 minutes, its about becoming famous to 15 people” (Hammock 2008). (MEGAN)

The 'illusion of intimacy' formed through parasocietal relationships between audience and actor changes to 'ambient intimacy' in the age of Web 2.0. The mood shifts and now the user creates themselves as celebrities. Through creating personas on facebook, twitter, avatars in second life individuals create images of themselves experiencing themselves as celebrities. This leads to a sense of ambience, a feeling associated with the particularity of a place. A feeling of being at home in the unfamiliar world of instant communication. This happens through following others, one gains a sense of ambient awareness as Thompson (2008) writes creates a feeling of being physically near someone, picking up on their moods through a sense of presence. (MEGAN)

Benjamin, Walter. (2008). The Work of Art in the age of its technological reproductibility and other writings on media.
. Jennings, M. and dohertty, B. and Levin, T. (Eds. Jephcott, Lingstone, Eiland (trans). Cambridge, Massachusetts: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press.

Boorstin, D. (1962). The Image, or What Happened to the American Dream. New York: Atheneum.

Donald Horton and Richard Wohl, 'Mass Communication and Parasocial Interaction: Observations on Intimacy at a Distance', Psychiatry 19: 215-29, 1956