Celebrity Identity

The familiar stranger is by no means unprecedented in history. People have long imagined a world populated by figures who were not physically at hand and yet seemed somehow preseng. What has changed, of course, is the magnitude of the flow, the range of characters that enter our world, their omnipresence, the sheer number of stories. Inevitably, today’s stories are but prologues or sequels to other stories, true and less true stories, stories that are themselves intermissions, stories without end (e.g., Gitlin, 2001:22). Since the Roman era, celebrity has always been a huge part of the play when it comes to culture shift. For example, the works of Graeme Turner on the book understanding celebrity (2004) provides a flow of discussion on the effect of media culture that is caused by celebrity.

This could be further analysed that it is not required for a celebrity to achieve great things to gain their fame - their popularity, but by developing a different and interesting character to satisfy and motivate their audiences, as Mendick (2015: 168) has stated “celebrity encourages and celebrates the notion of self-regulating, autonomous, individualised subjects, who are free and constraints.” Boorstin (1971: 57) also added “the celebrity, in turn, is the human equivalent: the ‘human pseudo event’, fabricated for the media and evaluated in terms of scale and effectiveness of their media visibility.” In media terms, pseudo event represent an event that is staged solely for media (e.g., Donald Trump giving his presidential speech). This draw the attention that there are a close relationship between celebrity and the media - which in this case, popular culture itself. Thus, this shows that celebrity is the main cause of effecting popular