Online celebrity discourses on Facebook

Abstract

The web 2.0 phenomenon and social media – without question – have reshaped our everyday experiences. These changes that they have generated affect how we consume, communicate and present ourselves, just to name a few aspects of life, and moreover, opened up new perspectives for sociology. Though many social practices persist in a somewhat altered form, brand new types of entities have emerged on different social media platforms: one of them is the video blogger. These actors have gained great visibility through so-called micro-celebrity practices and have become potential large-scale distributors of ideas, values and knowledge. Celebrities, in this case micro-celebrities (video bloggers), may disseminate such cognitive patterns through their constructed discourse which is objectified in the online space through a peculiar digital face (a social media profile) where fans can react, share and comment according to the affordances of the digital space. Most importantly, all of these interactions are accessible for scholars to examine the fan and celebrity practices of our era. This research attempts to reconstruct these discursive interactions on the Facebook pages of ten top Hungarian video bloggers. All findings are based on a large-scale data collection using the Netvizz application. As part of the interpretation of the results, a further consideration was that celebrity discourses may be a sort of disciplinary force in (post)modern society, which normalizes the individual to some extent by providing adequate schemas of attitude, mentality and ways of consumption.