Making of a Celebrity: An Imagined Community Construction by Indian Press

Abstract

With the arrival of graphic revolution, it has become increasingly impossible to draw the lines between personal and political, private and market. Television, social media and their imitative versions of newspapers have become dependent more on selling the images, literally and metaphorically to negate the pressure of public opinion in public sphere. Media as a social institution, serve the purpose of legitimizing the efforts of hegemony construction by different other social and religious institutions and in the process get involved in producing ‘metalanguage’. The efforts of media to turn everyone into celebrity enjoy the advantage of drawing public attention to farcical and construct an air of simplicity and ease. The emergence of celebrities with the help of pseudo-events in our social world has been able to foster a culture of consumption and leisure. Newspapers, supposedly a more sober and less instantaneous medium are also forced to follow the business rules set by the visual media. The intrinsic difference between a celebrity and a star happens to be one that a celebrity is in most cases incapable of becoming a star, which requires a certain amount of qualities. With the boundary between public and private closing down, the celebrities are in control of public imagination. Their existence in public life has been internalized giving birth to new kind of political discourses. The discursive elements of celebrity discourse are capable of giving birth to a new kind of ‘metalaguage’ also. The article looks into the construction of a celebrity in the pages of India’s most famous English newspapers and tries to analyze how these discursive elements are giving birth to new possibilities of a narcotizing dysfunction or collective amnesia.
 Keywords: Discourse position, discourse strand, celebritisation, para-social interaction, ideological square