Paper The Semiotics of Internet Celebrity: Gangnam Style Case by © Mingyi Hou (Tilburg University)
[email protected] © November 2013 The Semiotics of Internet Celebrity: Gangnam Style Case Mingyi Hou Abstract: In academia, celebrity study remains an ever growing interest, especially in media and culture studies. However, few researchers have expanded their scope of exploration to the celebrities who gain stardom across national and cultural borders. The current study considers Psy and his music video Gangnam Style as a site for examining globalized language and cultural contacts. Its primary concern is to investigate Internet celebrity in the context of multimodal media representation and superdiverse semiotic repertoires. The study identified lyrics, beats, dance gestures, characters, objects and places as the major semiotic modes of expression in the video. More meanings are added while they are produced into the materialized forms. Guided by the audiences’ replies to the journalistic commentaries on Gangnam Style, the study found that the music video is a heterogeneous construct, whose semiotic resources are ordered polycentricically to resonate with different audiences. Key words: Gangnam Style, Internet celebrity, semiotic resources, multimodal discourse analysis, online ethnography 1. Introduction The current research considers “Internet celebrity” as a site for studying globalized language and culture contact. Its primary concern is to investigate Internet celebrity from the perspective of superdiverse semiotic repertoire (Blommaert and Rampton, 2011). The first purpose of the research is to identify the various modes such as lyrics and place references employed in the music video. The second purpose is to discern the audiences’ interpretations of the contents of the video ethnographically.