Blog Post #1 Celebrity Culture

In class on Friday we talked about celebrity culture. We also watched a video about John Ronson and his new book. In the video we watched he told quite a tragic story. It was about a woman named Justine Sacco. Justine was just a normal woman who had the average number of friends and not many twitter followers. Never the less, she tweeted anyway and loved the responses she got from all of her friends. One day she tweeted, "Going to Africa. Hope I don't get AID's. Just kidding, I'm white". She sent the tweet right before her flight took off and she wasn't expecting much from this tweet, maybe a favorite or two. When her flight touched down in Africa she turned her phone back on and couldn't believe what she saw. She got major feedback on this tweet. Thousands of people had replied to her tweet and posted about her, all negative things of course. She got death threats and many other forms of back lash. She even got her own hashtag saying #HasJustineLandedYet. She was made famous over night.
Celebrity culture is, essentially, knowing about a celebrity and feeling connected to them even though you've never met them. In a way Ms. Sacco was made a celebrity over night. In just about 12 hours the people of the internet knew about her and felt connected to what she had said, enough to give her feedback on how they felt about it. Poor Justine was only trying to make a joke but the public felt the need to pry into her life and tell her how they felt about her now that she tweeted something they didn't like. People do this to celebrities all the time. When someone does something we don't agree with we feel obligated to let everyone we know about it. This is exactly what happened to Justine Sacco and it is quite unfortunate. 

Comments

  1. Shaaun_aFebruary 1, 2018 at 9:38 AM

    I agree completely, the thing people do not realize enough is that it's just as easy to become a celebrity, if not easier, from negative exposure versus positive exposure. Whenever you make someone mad, chances are there's a ton of other people who will feel the same way about the subject.

    ReplyDelete
  2. UnknownFebruary 13, 2018 at 5:41 AM

    I completely agree with you, people think that it hard to become a star when it really isn't people also don't seem to realize what they say one line has consequences.

    ReplyDelete

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