Prelims

Half Title Page

Internet Celebrity

Understanding Fame Online

Series Page

SocietyNow

SocietyNow: Short, informed books, explaining why our world is the way it is, now.

The SocietyNow series provides readers with a definitive snapshot of the events, phenomena and issues that are defining our 21st century world. Written by leading experts in their fields, and publishing as each subject is being contemplated across the globe, titles in the series offer a thoughtful, concise and rapid response to the major political and economic events and social and cultural trends of our time.

SocietyNow makes the best of academic expertise accessible to a wider audience, to help readers untangle the complexities of each topic and make sense of our world the way it is, now.

• The Trump Phenomenon: How the Politics of Populism Won in 2016

  Peter Kivisto

• Becoming Digital: Towards a Post-Internet Society

  Vincent Mosco

• Understanding Brexit: Why Britain Voted to Leave the European Union

  Graham Taylor

• Selfies: Why We Love (and Hate) Them

  Katrin Tiidenberg

• Kardashian Kulture: How Celebrities Changed Life in the 21st Century

  Ellis Cashmore

• Poverty in Britain: Causes, Consequences and Myths

  Tracy Shildrick

Dedication

“A succulent collection of up to date and incisive contributions to the field of global micro-celebrity. It offers an impressive array of new ideas and arguments to help us to understand and research one of the characteristic developments of our time.”

Chris Rojek,

Professor of Sociology,

City, University of London

“Crystal Abidin has produced a most useful book. It brings our understanding of internet celebrity right up to date, and does so with an exemplary attention to its proliferating diversity of form, content, structure and location.”

Graeme Turner,

University of Queensland

Title Page

Internet Celebrity

Understanding Fame Online

by

Crystal Abidin

Jönköping University, Sweden

United Kingdom – North America – Japan India – Malaysia – China

Copyright Page

Emerald Publishing Limited

Howard House, Wagon Lane, Bingley BD16 1WA, UK

First edition 2018

Copyright © 2018 Emerald Publishing Limited

Reprints and permissions service

Contact: permissions@emeraldinsight.com

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, transmitted in any form or by any means electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise without either the prior written permission of the publisher or a licence permitting restricted copying issued in the UK by The Copyright Licensing Agency and in the USA by The Copyright Clearance Center. No responsibility is accepted for the accuracy of information contained in the text, illustrations or advertisements. The opinions expressed in these chapters are not necessarily those of the Author or the publisher.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN: 978-1-78756-079-6 (Paperback)

ISBN: 978-1-78756-076-5 (Online)

ISBN: 978-1-78756-078-9 (Epub)

Dedication

To Carissa:

For growing up with me on the internet,

And growing old with me in my heart.

Acknowledgements

I have chanced upon the rare luck of being mentored by some of the most intelligent, generous, and caring academics in my field. While there are too many to name here in this book, I would like to thank especially Theresa M. Senft for being an ever critical and mentoring intellectual champion of my research as I build on her milestone work on microcelebrity.

Special thanks to my colleagues Annette Markham and Katrin Tiidenberg who first suggested that I write this book one glorious evening in July 2017, as we lounged over fancy, home-cooked feasts on the coziest rooftop in Aarhus.

Portions of this work were presented at various conferences and seminars, during which I have had the opportunity to field thought-provoking Q&As. While there have been several such events, I would like especially to thank the organizers and attendees of the Affective Politics of Social Media conference at the University of Turku; the Association of Internet Researchers conference 2017 in Tartu; the Australian and New Zealand Communication Association conference 2017 at the University of Sydney; the Centre for Culture and Technology (CCAT) seminar series at Curtin University; the Digitizing Early Childhood International Conference in Perth; and the Digital Living Summer School Programme at Aarhus University.

I wrote this text in the months during which I was a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Media Management and Transformation Centre (MMTC) at Jönköping University, and Adjunct Research Fellow at the Centre for Culture and Technology (CCAT) at Curtin University. I am grateful for the support and care of my colleagues at both institutions and would like to thank Leona Achtenhagen, Ingrid Aronsson, Barbara Eklöf, Mart Ots, and Emilia Florin Samuelsson from the MMTC, and Emma de Francisco, John Hartley, Tama Leaver, and Lucy Montgomery from the CCAT.

At Emerald Publishing, I am indebted to Jen McCall who first commissioned this text, Rachel Ward for managing the tiresome administrative work, and Sarah Broadley for expertly laboring over marketing the book. I thank also the anonymous reviewers for giving their critical feedback on my work, and the leading scholars in celebrity studies who have generously provided expert blurbs.

The beautiful line sketches were provided by LIBA Studio, to whom I express my admiration of their creativity and my gratitude for their expertise. I would also like to acknowledge Jill Walker Rettberg from whom I adapted this innovative imaging method.

Several ideas and case studies throughout the book were adapted from posts on my academic blog wishcrys.com, on which I write about developments in the world of internet celebrities and vernacular social media cultures. For this, I am thankful to anyone who has ever read, shared, or commented on my running streams of consciousness (affectionately known as ‘brainfarts’ to my readers) on any of my blogs since 2008.

On social media, I crowdsourced examples of everyone’s favorite internet snippet, artifact, icon, or personality to consider a cultural variety of case studies for this book. Thank you to everyone who responded to me. It was a wild experience learning about your guilty pleasures on the internet ヽ(o＾▽＾o)ノ.

To some of my most favorite peers in my work life: Kath Albury, Megan Lindsay Brown, Paul Byron, Jocelyn Cleghorn, Stefanie Duguay, Sara Ekberg, Natalie Hendry, Tim Highfield, Jenny Kennedy, Liew Kai Khiun, Maki Mayer, Kristian M⊘ller, Natalie Pang, Brady Robards, Gabriele de Seta, Sander Schwartz, Tan Shao Han, Katrin Tiidenberg, Son Vivienne, Katie Warfield, and Meg Zeng, thank you for nourishing academia (and my life) with your hearts and your brains ⊂(´• ω •`⊂).

To my people at home: Char+Nick, Jo+Jon, Wei+Joe, thank you for growing old with me <3.

To my person, Sherm: Thank you for being such a wonderfully weird human being. May we ever be blessed with high-speed internet in our home.

And finally, to you, the reader: Thank you for picking up this book. Happy rabbit-holing. Long live the internet.

Contents

List of Illustrations

Preface

It has been ten years since the first scholarly book on celebrity on the internet was published. Global studies scholar Theresa Senft’s Camgirls (2008) was a groundbreaking ethnography that traced the practices of young American women who acquired internet fame by broadcasting their personal lives via webcams in their bedrooms. Since then, the structure, nature, and culture of internet celebrity has evolved drastically around the world.

As digital technology has advanced, and social media platforms have instituted new forms of interpersonal communication, internet fame appears to have become increasingly accessible and practiced by or bestowed upon ordinary people from all walks of life. In tandem with this, developments among traditional celebrities and public figures, such as the proliferation of traditional Hollywood-esque celebrities turning to social media to communicate with fans, or politicians taking to social media to cultivate a willing citizenry, also evidence the enduring importance of social media as a mainstream communication tool. Further, amidst the rush for legacy media to move into digital estates to wrestle against their dwindling print media readership, and the rise of the gig economy in which young people are turning to web-based publishing and self-curated content for an income, newer forms of internet celebrity are entangling with and innovating away from older media formats.

In response, this book presents an updated, bird’s-eye view of what contemporary internet celebrity and fame online look like. Case studies survey how internet fame is facilitated by the most popular English-language social media platforms today, such as Facebook, Instagram, Reddit, Tumblr, Twitter, and YouTube. However, given that much of the academic research on celebrity culture has thus far been focused on the Global North, and drawing on my research focus on East Asian internet cultures, the case studies discussed were intentionally sampled to include key examples from China, Japan, Singapore, South Korea, and Taiwan, alongside examples from Australia, England, Sweden, and the USA.

A brief note on terminology: While there exists decades of research into the evolution of media industries, from the earliest days of broadcast radio and television, to cross-media formats such as newspapers and print magazines, to contemporary digital formats such as websites and social media, throughout this book I use “traditional media” as a shorthand for these legacy media formats that are generally highly institutionalized, gatekept, hierarchical, and authoritative in the production and circulation of content, as opposed to the more accessible, reciprocal, interactive, open, and democratic uses of “social media.”

The accessible language and diverse array of case studies in this book cater to a variety of readers. Students and scholars will find the review of current literature and concepts useful; keen followers of the Influencer scene and people who work in the industry will enjoy the spread of key issues highlighted for discussion; and casual readers who might just like to learn a bit more about internet celebrity will understand how this culture has impacted our contemporary society.

It is my hope that everyone who picks up this book will acquire a valuable insight into internet celebrity culture, beyond the populist claim that these are merely frivolous, vain, or meaningless practices on the internet. Indeed, one of my key scholarly ethics is the belief in “subversive frivolity,” wherein practices or objects that are usually brushed off or discarded as marginal, inconsequential, and unproductive hold generative power that is underestimated and under-visibilized because they thrive just under the radar.

In fact, while the notions of “internet” and “celebrity” may immediately bring to mind visualizations of being loud and proud, the impacts of internet celebrity culture are often counterintuitively taking root deeply, slowly but surely, and in quiet confidence, in all aspects of society such as economics, legality, culture, and social issues. As cultures of internet celebrity continue to bloom around the world, the ideas and frameworks in this book will provide provocations and insights for understanding how fame is generated, circulated, sustained, consumed, or rejected on the internet on a global scale.

Finally, a humble request: If you have enjoyed this book, I would love to hear from you. It is always an anxious exercise putting ideas into words, words onto paper, and paper into book form for the world to see. It would be a romantic experiment to watch this little book roam across places akin to the folklore of the traveling garden gnome, so please allow me to trace this journey through digital postcards, i.e. photographs of this text “in the wild.” Are you a curious passerby reading it from the comfort of a cosy couch? Are you a student reading it for a class? Are you an internet celebrity reading it between social media updates? Send me photographs from where you are reading this book (plus points for selfies); drop me a message about what you felt (I’m not difficult to locate on the internet); and enchant me with stories about your favorite internet celebrities and artifacts from your part of the world (links!) – I would love to learn more about the quirky rabbit hole of internet celebrity from your part of the internet.

Alternatively, feel free to drop me falling penguin GIFs, Pusheen stickers, or videos of babies tasting lemons for the first time, now that you know where I live on the internet.

Yours,

Crystal Abidin aka wishcrys.