Cameras and Constructs and Cancels, Oh My! Thinking Through Youth and Celebrity

Abstract

Cameras and Constructs and Cancels, Oh My!Thinking Through Youth and Celebrity Maria Alberto (bio) Duvall, Spring-Serenity, editor. Celebrity and Youth: Mediated Audiences, Fame Aspirations, and Identity Formation. Lang, 2019. 236 pp. $54.95 pb. ISBN 9781433143090. Mediated Youth Series. Lyga, Barry, and Morgan Baden. The Hive. Kids Can, 2019. 416 pp. $18.99 hc. ISBN 9781525300608. Reid, Raziel. Kens. Penguin, 2018. 256 pp. $17.99 hc. ISBN 9780735263772. Gershowitz, Jordan. Ignore the Trolls. Illustrated by Sandhya Prabhat, Pow! Kids Books, 2019. 32 pp. $17.99 hc. ISBN 9781576879337. With the collection Celebrity and Youth: Mediated Audiences, Fame Aspirations, and Identity Formation, editor Spring-Serenity Duvall and her contributors set out to interrogate the many complex, multi-faceted connections between youth and celebrity. As Duvall promises readers in her introduction, Celebrity and Youth offers a rich, interdisciplinary dive into the many strands connecting these two concepts, including social media, political meaning-making, explorations of sexuality and ageing, parasocial relationships, fandom, and identity work, among others. This collection is a timely addition to the growing body of interdisciplinary work on celebrity culture, particularly with its focus on how social constructions and conceptions of "youth" help to produce and impact wider perceptions of what "celebrity" is in the first place. Because each term tends to be used broadly and uncritically, Duvall begins by acknowledging that both youth and celebrity are complex, socially constructed phenomena. She then considers how more nuanced definitions demonstrate the problems with such common conceptions as "Celebrity culture is youth-obsessed and young people are obsessed with celebrities" (1). Duvall points out that this kind of simple causation statement actually abridges or outright overlooks particular dynamics of power, consumer preferences, and other [End Page 160] simultaneous factors (1). Throughout this collection, Duvall and her contributors address such oversights through a range of interdisciplinary analyses that explore how young people—from preteens to teens and even young adults—interact with the concept of celebrity as identity work, a pathway to economic success, or an avenue into learning about global issues, among other reasons. Contributors' analyses build from a diverse range of case studies conducted across the UK, the EU, the US, and Canada, and privilege young people's own interactions with celebrity. The result is an interesting and compelling interdisciplinary work replete with insights that should prove valuable to readers across a range of disciplines themselves. YA-savvy readers in particular might see interesting reflections of concepts from this collection in recent fiction aimed at readers of the same demographics. Barry Lyga and Morgan Baden's The Hive, for instance, grapples with hyperscrutiny, technological manipulation, and the issues that can come of having users—particularly teenagers—"live" parts of their lives on social media for public consumption. The Hive follows Cassie, the teenage daughter of a recently deceased hacker, as she finds herself a social pariah on the run after making a morbid joke about the sitting president on social media. Her post costs Cassie because, in The Hive, Americans' social media usage is aggregated on a platform called BLINQ, where user reactions are collated into trends called "Levels" and mobs are encouraged to sanction users whose posts generate high Levels of collective condemnation. With this as its backdrop, The Hive brings together an uncanny technological uneasiness reminiscent of Black Mirror with a gamified struggle for survival that should look familiar to anyone who has read The Hunger Games. The result is the creation of a dystopian near future in which the conferral of microcelebrity can become a real punishment for unlucky teenagers. Lyga and Baden's version of microcelebrity becomes especially sinister in the ways in which it contorts the three elements that Ana Jorge and Thays Nunes see as defining teenage microcelebrity: courting audience attention (Celebrity and Youth 40-41), then "successfully managing these connections" (41), and finally, using social media platforms in self-aware ways (41). In The Hive, though, each of these three features of teenage microcelebrity has been warped by BLINQ. Cassie does not court the scope of audience attention she actually receives, cannot possibly "manage" the narrative that her single post is spun into, and later discovers that the BLINQ [End Page 161...