Socialising celebrity

At the time of writing this editorial, we have just finished curating the programme for the second Celebrity Studies conference, held in June 2014 at Royal Holloway University, UK. When looking through the set of exciting abstracts – 160 papers have been scheduled – it became apparent that the dominant theme of concern was the relationship between celebrity and social media; or more specifically, celebrity and Twitter. With titles including ‘Performing Online: Celebrity Politics, Young Citizens and Social Media’, ‘The “Work” of Wrestlers: Creative Negotiation of Personas via Social Media & Cultural Entrepreneurship’ and ‘Watch the Birdie: The Cultural Politics of Twitter and the Celebrity Group Selfie’, scholars were aiming to explore socialising celebrity through a range of political, aesthetic and ideological lenses. Such a growth of interest in the social media is entirely welcome in the field given that, for the last few years, academic work on its relationship to celebrity has been relatively sparse, although one should also note that there is always a catch-up game being played between contemporary developments in the media and their published, academic exploration. Nonetheless, there have been a number of key interventions, including important work by P. David Marshall (2006) on the contemporary shift from the concept of the representational to the ‘presentational self’, Alice Marwick and danah boyd’s (2011) work in ‘To See and Be Seen: Celebrity Practice on Twitter’ and Nick Muntean and Anne Helen Petersen’s (2009) ‘Celebrity Twitter: Strategies of Intrusion and Disclosure in the Age of Technoculture’. As the conference abstracts attest, a greater range of perspectives and critical voices is now joining these scholars. As with the advent of each ‘new’ media form, a key question that emerges is the impact such technologies have had on how celebrity is represented, circulated, commodified, and consumed. According to Marshall, ‘the symbiotic relationship between media and celebrity has been ruptured somewhat in the last decade through the development of new media’ (2006, p. 634). It is precisely the extent of this ‘rupture’ that has been examined by subsequent work. What is emphasised in particular here is the shift from a traditional understanding of ‘celebrity management’ which is highly controlled and institutionalised, to ‘one in which performers and personalities actively addresses and interacts with fans’ (Marwick and boyd 2011, p. 140). This is a shift that has been seen as both offering celebrities greater control in the management of their image (so responding to ‘misleading’ press representation or posting their own pictures of themselves) as well as becoming a site of risk in the way their images are controlled and maintained (celebrities courting controversy by posting opinions and comments that are not always vetted or shaped by a surrounding management team). At the same time, caution has been exercised with regard to the question of whether Twitter has easily ‘democratised’ the relationship between celebrity and audience. For example, Marwick and boyd observe that ‘celebrity is Celebrity Studies, 2014 Vol. 5, No. 3, 223–224, http://dx.doi. org/10.1080/19392397.2014. 935631