Fame games
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| Research team: |
| Professor Graeme Turner and Dr Frances Bonner (Centre for Critical and Cultural Studies, School of English, Media Studies and Art History), Professor David Marshall (Northeastern University, Boston) |
| Funding: |
| ARC large grant ($120,000) |
| Email/Web link: |
| graeme.turner@mailbox.uq.edu.au f.bonner@mailbox.uq.edu.au davmarsh@lynx.neu.edu |
| Faculty of Arts |
Twin Kylies ? real and waxwork ? are the cover shot for what is believed to be the first study and book examining the production of celebrity.
Fame Games: the Production of Celebrity in Australia (Cambridge University Press, $32.95) examines how the publicity, public relations and promotions industries have developed and how celebrity is produced, promoted and traded within the Australian media.
The study attempts to explain the appeal of celebrities to the market and the process of how stories about celebrities reach the media.
A core argument is that the decline of hard news has been accompanied by the rise of gossip and celebrity as part of a complex new role for the media, the construction of identity.
True to the content, the researchers selected one of Australia's best known international celebrities to demonstrate how images of celebrities are used to sell and promote product, albeit their own in this case.
"The promotions industry has been considered to be on the periphery of the media, yet forms a fundamental component of the media industries," authors Professor Graeme Turner, Dr Frances Bonner and Associate Professor David Marshall said.
"There's an assumption that accepts the role of publicity is an aberration, but in fact it's the way the media operates.
"You can't have an aberration providing regular news. Some sections of newspapers are dependent on groups such as television network publicists for cross-promotional use of celebrities. Previous studies of the influence of public relations on news indicate that the percentage of publicity-sourced news varies from 50 percent to up to 95 percent, depending on the media."
The researchers said the interlocking nature of the industry saw celebrities as useful tools for promoting other media products. The justification for this rationale was the public fascination with celebrities, resulting in a kind of networked hybrid image of identity.
The book, last year short-listed for the Cultural Theory Prize in the New South Wales Premier's Literary Awards for 2000, is based on a three-year, Australian Research Council-funded project.
It features interviews with publicists, promoters, agents, managers and magazine editors about the processes through which celebrity in Australia is produced. Magazines included some of Australia's largest, from teenage magazines to Who Weekly and New Idea.
Professor Turner, Dr Bonner and Dr Marshall said their research indicated a pervasive shift in media emphasis and that the modern media was increasingly assuming an important role in constructing identity.
