January 18, 2008
Graeme Turner invented the term "demotic turn" to describe the current convergence of celebrity and the ordinary, or the elevation of the ordinary to celebrity status. He writes:
"In Understanding Celebrity (2004), I coined the term 'the demotic turn' as a means of referring to the increasing visibility of the 'ordinary person' as they turn themselves into media content through celebrity culture, reality TV, DIY websites, talk radio and the like. In the context of the book, it was used as a means of understanding the proliferation of celebrity across the media since the 1980s, as well as celebrity's colonization of the expectations of everyday life in contemporary western societies, particularly among teenagers and young adults."
Enter Corey Delaney. He's an example of what Chris Rojek calls a celetoid. Turner quotes Rojek:
"Celetoids are the accessories of cultures organized around mass communications and staged authenticity. Examples include lottery winners, one-hit wonders, stalkers, whistle-blowers, sports' arena streakers, have-a-go-heroes, mistresses of public figures and the various other social types who command media attention one day and are forgotten the next."
Although if Corey plays his cards right his celetoid moment could land him a good job in event management or PR.
Turner thinks "we need to reconsider our understandings of what kind of cultural apparatus the media has become". It's gone beyond broadcasting information about what's going on and who we are, to shaping both of those. In our democratic culture the elevation of the ordinary appears to be a democratising process, but like everything else produced by the entertainment industry the impression is false. What if Corey had been Aboriginal?
Turner argues that "it is important to remember that celebrity still remains a systematically hierarchical and exclusive category, no matter how much it proliferates". This is how I understand the blogosphere as well. There is a hierarchy of sites, then mini hierarchies within sites from the most knowledgeable and articulate down to the semi-literate hysteric. A lot of bloggers strike me as celebrity opinion columnist wannabees, duplicating the offline environment online, while appearing to be ordinary, democratic, egalitarian.
On developments in media and reality TV Turner says we need to reconsider the idea that media is simply a mediator, that perhaps it has become "an author rather than a mediator or translator of cultural identity". Has it rewritten us as celebrities? Is celebrity becoming the Australian way of life?
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Lyn,
the‘demotic turn’ in reality TV and celebrity culture is news to me. I understand that it is Turner's way of characterizing the increasing production of ‘ordinary’ celebrities through reality TV and DIY celebrity websites.Thus Australian Idol, Big Brother,and Corey.
Doesn't this imply that the public sphere is increasingly trivialised; commercialise; dominated by spectacle; fragmented and associated with an apathetic response to traditional forms of political engagement. I'm working off Lelia Green's review of Alan McKee's The Public Sphere: An Introduction (Cambridge University Press, Melbourne,
2005) and Graeme Turner's Understanding Celebrity, (Sage Publications, London, 2004) entitled Understanding celebrity and the public sphere.
Doesn't this celeb culture also imply that we now have a postmodern public sphere as opposed to the modernist one of middle class highly educated (mostly male) public intellectuals; a public sphere that systematically excluded and marginalised those whom liberal modernity’s view of the 'other' through the mechanism of ‘rational, logical’ debate and argument. Thus
This rational argument mechanism is what conservatives like Tim Blair have challenged and work to undermine. They work very differently---in a humorous aggressive style.