LaShayna Suhr

Celebrities and fame? Is this a lifestyle that anyone can have? Is a celebrity’s world better than an average person? My first take away was the concept of identification. “Identification is a mechanism through which an audience members experience reception and interpretation of the text from the inside as if the events were happening to them.” (Cohen, 2001). I compared my identification to Novalle off of the movie “Where the Heart is”. She is a single mother who gets left by her boyfriend in an unfamiliar town and has a baby in a Walmart. I haven’t had those experiences, but my life is similar to her’s as a mom. I think that I can definitely relate to her personality and the way she handles things. I also feel that it is easier for people to identify with fictional characters rather than real people such as sports stars and how actors are in real life. It gives us all a chance to think in someone else’s life and pretend we are out of our own lives for a couple hours. It takes us out of our own reality. We find similarities but also differences and relate them to our own lives and how we are in our own worlds. Cohen separates identifying and liking someone as liking is an external process and identification is an internal process. Liking someone can mean you like something about them, their personality or their sense of humor. Identification is more like feeling you are like them or imagining yourself as who they are. So all in all identifying with someone is relating to them in some type of way that is familiar or the same to how you as a person are and how the way of life is. This element of celebrity and fame I think enhances our culture because it gives people the need to feel like they are not alone in whatever life challenges they are going through and that they are not any lower or any better than anyone else. If they can find someone to identify with , maybe it gives them a sense of security or even a sense of leaving reality and zoning out and pretending that they are their favorite character on tv or their favorite book.


The second concept I found interesting was the celebrity twitter. “Twitter is a relatively new social media website and a good option for celebrities who want to chat with their fans without having to give away personal access information.” (Stever,Lawson,2013). Social media is a huge hit in today’s society. Anywhere you look there is someone zoned into their iphone, tablet, or ipad. Everyone is all about Facebook, Twitter, and Myspace. Twitter is a social network site where you can choose to follow your favorite celebrities and keep up with what they are up to in their professional careers without being a stalker. Celebrities can advertise their products, spread word about their new hit movie that’s coming out, and even reach out for more careers and jobs. With one click of the mouse they are updating millions of fans to what is new with them and what they are up to. They don’t have to deal with someone finding where they are even though creepers are out there; Twitter is a safer networking site. I found it pretty interesting that the article found that older celebrities posted more about their professional careers and the younger celebrities posted more about what they were doing in their extracurricular activities. I can see this because the younger generations are more raised around the social networking phase and therefore put more personal things and opinions out for the world to see, while the older generation is a little bit more private. I would say this deteriorates our culture because it is all about online relationships instead of real personal relationships like in the older days. All the information you want/need is at the click of a mouse today. 


The last takeaway that I enjoyed from the course was the growing up online video. It is absolutely insane how today world is revolves around social media sites and how everyone that has a social network account is so interested in updating their status rather than writing their paper for school. Technology is increasing in today’s classrooms and most teachers aren’t even sure how to use most of it because it’s so new, but yet the students are the ones teaching the teachers how to run all the new programs. The other thing I found interesting about this video was the girl Jessica. She was kind of timid and shy and didn’t really have many friends. She made up a girl on the internet, changed her appearance and all of a sudden it was like she was a whole different person making up her own way of how she wanted to be. She would post up on sexy photos and then it all caught up with her and backfired. Adolescents spend almost all of their time on networking sites and phones they are the technology generation. I graduated in 2003 and I never had my first cell phone until I was 20 years old. My little brother who is 12 has his own iphone. This new era is getting information faster, quicker, and easier. So many horrible things have happened because of a status update, drama on facebook, or even someone posting something that was taken wrong. I think of the show “Catfish” on MTV, this is where these couples have relationship with someone completely online and then the show takes them to finally meet and it seems in almost every single episode one of the people is not who they say they are. It is only going to get worse as the years go on. I am really afraid of what the technological world will have out by the time my children are teenagers (they are 3 and 6). So many privacy issues, cyber bullying and even crimes have been committed from online posts. On the other side, social networking also has some positives like I’ve seen in my own Facebook about an amber alert and then people just share it on their Facebook pages and it eventually gets to someone who knew someone who seen the girl. It can be good in that sense. I feel this also deteriorates our culture because instead of having personal relationships people are donig it all exclusively online.It is really scary how everything from dating to shopping is almost all done online in society today.  These are the three main things I took from this course. I really enjoyed this course and took a lot of information that I didn't know prior to taking this class.

So when we think of celebrity and fame, would you want to live in that world? Have people constantly talking to or about you? I know I wouldn’t want to deal with any of that. Money isn’t everything!