Twenty-First Century Celebrity by David C. Giles

Author:David C. Giles [Giles, David C.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Barnesnoble:
Publisher: Emerald Publishing
Published: 2018-09-13T00:00:00+00:00

The Challenge Format

A popular format among YouTubers of all stripes is the challenge, which has spawned several sub-formats of its own (the ice bucket challenge, condom challenge and so on), and gives them the opportunity to maximise their potential audience by enlisting the participation of fellow YouTubers. This is usually traditional slapstick entertainment that is particularly enjoyed by younger fans (Andò, 2016).

YouTubers as (Micro?)-celebrities

Having described the broad cultural environment of YouTube and its opportunities for new kinds of highly popular individual to emerge, I would now like to turn to the question of whether we can consider these individual celebrities in the traditional sense of the word (that is, in accordance with the definitions outlined in chapter 1) or whether they are better understood as an entirely new phenomenon. Is the concept of micro-celebrity sufficient to describe the likes of PewDiePie and Zoella with their vast global audiences, or do we need a unique concept to capture these emerging public figures?

The first issue to resolve is how we might best distinguish YouTube celebrities from other forms of celebrity, traditional and digital. A simple, but useful, definition is provided by Lovelock (2017, p. 90): “YouTube celebrity denotes an individual whose celebrity stems directly from their activities on the site.” I would amend this slightly, replacing ‘celebrity’ with ‘fame’ because, though celebrity status may be somewhat in dispute (and some definitions of celebrity are based on representation in traditional media), there can be little disagreement with the claim that someone with 62 million subscribers is famous.

One interesting phenomenon to be considered is that YouTubers themselves, and particularly their fans, are not always comfortable with the term “celebrity”. In a television interview with Sky News, Alfie Deyes claimed that his success was down to not being a celebrity: “I think what people love about vlogging is that we aren’t celebrities, we’re just normal… it’s the normality that people love” (Nkadi, 2015). It is a sentiment echoed by (some of) his fans: “He’s normal, not like celebrities”, said one teenage girl at a Deyes book signing (Samadder, 2014) although another interviewee disputed this. The attractiveness of ‘normality’ has clear links with that of ‘ordinariness’, and inevitably, authenticity, which is explored in more depth in the next chapter.

A rare academic study that has collected interview data with vloggers and their adolescent audience is Andò (2016), in which the latter group was particularly dismissive of the term. Vloggers, according to one fan (Ibid, p. 133), “are not real celebrities… just simple girls who tell us about their lives. They don’t want to be stars.” Most fans stressed how similar the vloggers were to themselves (“they talk about their everyday life, their school and so on” and “the same things happen to me”); the age gap, rather than a distancing factor, was seen as a reason to trust their advice. Rather than explicitly rejecting the celebrity label, the vloggers themselves tended towards modesty, describing it instead as “this completely absurd experience on YouTube”, as a temporary status that is “really nice”, “beautiful”, and so on.

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