Celebrity Gossip Blogs and Their Audiences
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University of Massachusetts Amherst ScholarWorks@UMass Amherst Open Access Dissertations 9-2010 Gossip Talk and Online Community: Celebrity Gossip Blogs and Their Audiences Erin Ann Meyers University of Massachusetts Amherst, [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://scholarworks.umass.edu/open_access_dissertations Part of the Communication Commons Recommended Citation Meyers, Erin Ann, "Gossip Talk and Online Community: Celebrity Gossip Blogs and Their Audiences" (2010). Open Access Dissertations. 292. https://scholarworks.umass.edu/open_access_dissertations/292 This Open Access Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by ScholarWorks@UMass Amherst. It has been accepted for inclusion in Open Access Dissertations by an authorized administrator of ScholarWorks@UMass Amherst. For more information, please contact [email protected]. GOSSIP TALK AND ONLINE COMMUNITY: CELEBRITY GOSSIP BLOGS AND THEIR AUDIENCES A Dissertation Presented by ERIN A. MEYERS Submitted to the Graduate School of the University of Massachusetts Amherst in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY September 2010 Department of Communication © Copyright by Erin A. Meyers 2010 All Rights Reserved GOSSIP TALK AND ONLINE COMMUNITY: CELEBRITY GOSSIP BLOGS AND THEIR AUDIENCES A Dissertation Presented by Erin A. Meyers Approved as to style and content by: _______________________________________ Anne Ciecko, Chair _______________________________________ Emily West, Member _______________________________________ Demetria Shabazz, Member _______________________________________ Randall Knoper, Member ____________________________________ Lisa Henderson, Department Chair Department of Communication ACKNOWLEDGMENTS This project would never have come to fruition without the generous advice and the personal and academic support from my advisors, friends, and family. I thank all my committee members for expertise and advice at all stages of this project. I particularly thank my committee chair, Anne Ciecko, for helping me at every step along the way without ever forcing me down one particular road. She allowed me the freedom to conceive and conduct this project on my own terms, while offering invaluable theoretical and practical guidance as I progressed. Her enthusiasm for my project kept me motivated throughout this process. I also thank Emily West for her invaluable assistance in this project, especially in defining and implementing audience research methods. I am particularly thankful that she introduced me to and helped me learn the NVivo qualitative research software, which made the analysis of my mountains of data much more manageable. Thanks also to the Communication Department faculty members and graduate students who guided my academic progress in the department and this project in formal and informal ways. I am especially indebted to Jarice Hanson and the graduate students who allowed me to join their Internet Research Methods seminar in the fall of 2009 for their invaluable help designing my online survey. I am extremely grateful for the support, academic and otherwise, I received from my graduate student friends and colleagues at UMass. Thank you for putting up with my random emails, offering advice when I encountered roadblocks, keeping me sane, and even indulging me in an occasional karaoke night during this long and often isolating iv process. In particular, thanks to Sreela Sarkar, Eve Ng, Brian Myers, Andrea Bergstrom, Lori Bindig, and Joanna Brook. Though geographically distant, my mother, Jean Meyers, offered unwavering love and pride in my progress and a safe retreat when I needed to escape. I thank her for all her constant support and confidence in my abilities. And I offer my deepest thanks to my wonderful husband, Michael DeLuca, for his love, good humor, generosity, and, most of all, patience during this entire process. I simply could not have done it without him. v ABSTRACT GOSSIP TALK AND ONLINE COMMUNITY: CELEBRITY GOSSIP BLOGS AND THEIR AUDIENCES SEPTEMBER 1, 2010 ERIN A. MEYERS, B.A., TUFTS UNIVERSITY M.A., THE OHIO STATE UNIVERSITY Ph.D., UNIVERSITY OF MASSACHUSETTS AMHERST Directed by: Professor Anne T. Ciecko Celebrity gossip blogs have quickly established themselves as a new media phenomenon that is transforming celebrity culture. This dissertation is an examination of the impact of the technological and textual shifts engendered by new media on the use of gossip as a form of everyday cultural production. Broadly, I investigate the historical role of gossip media texts in celebrity culture and explore how celebrity gossip blogs have reconfigured audience engagements with celebrity culture. Following Gamson‘s (1994) approach to celebrity as a cultural phenomenon, I separate celebrity gossip blogs into three elements—texts, producers, and audiences— and examine the interplay between them using ethnographic methods adapted to the new media setting. I begin with an investigation of what is being said about celebrity on gossip blogs, supported by my five-week online fieldwork observation of six heavily- trafficked, commercially-supported celebrity gossip blogs. I focus on visual images and blogger commentary as the key elements of gossip blogs as media texts. I supplement these observations with oral interviews of the producers of these texts, the gossip bloggers. I argue that the blogger, as the primary author of the site, retains authority as a vi cultural producer of these texts. The final component of this study focuses on the reading and cultural production practices of celebrity gossip blog audiences using data gathered online and through a qualitative survey. I examine the various ways these practices support the emergence of community within these virtual spaces. While I claim that gossip is an active engagement with celebrity culture well suited to new media‘s emphasis on immediacy and interactivity, I conclude that an active audience is necessarily a resistant one. Blogs can be seen as a space for intervention into celebrity culture that allows bloggers and readers to challenge the power of the media industry to define celebrity culture. However, gossip blogs often uphold oppressive norms, particularly around questions of gender, race, and sexuality. Gossip is an important area of inquiry because it reveals the way women, the predominant audience for and participants on gossip blogs, may be implicated in the normative ideologies forwarded by the celebrity media. vii TABLE OF CONTENTS Page ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ................................................................................................. iv ABSTRACT ....................................................................................................................... vi LIST OF FIGURES ......................................................................................................... xiii CHAPTER 1. INTRODUCTION ..........................................................................................................1 Description of Data ..................................................................................................3 Statement of Research Questions.............................................................................5 Overview of Methods ..............................................................................................7 Summary of Chapters ............................................................................................11 2. THE CELEBRITY IMAGE AND GOSSIP MEDIA ...................................................16 Stardom and Celebrity: Understanding the Image .................................................16 Celebrity and Media ...............................................................................................20 Gossip and the Celebrity Image .............................................................................25 Reading Celebrity in Gossip Media .......................................................................30 Celebrity Gossip and Community-Building ..........................................................33 3. NEW MEDIA AND CELEBRITY GOSSIP BLOGS ..................................................38 Defining New Media..............................................................................................39 The Blog as Textual Format ..................................................................................42 Interactivity vs. Participation .....................................................................45 Gossip in New Media: Defining the Celebrity Gossip Blog..................................47 Perez Hilton (www.perezhilton.com) ........................................................52 Pink Is The New Blog (www.pinkithenewblog.com) ................................55 Pop Sugar (www.popsugar.com) ...............................................................55 What Would Tyler Durden Do (www.wwtdd.com) ..................................57 Jezebel (www.jezebel.com) .......................................................................58 The Young, Black and Fabulous (www.theybf.com) ................................59 New Media and the Metaphor of Community .......................................................61 viii Towards a Definition of Online Community .............................................63 Fandom and Online Community ................................................................67 The Practice Approach to Online Community...........................................70