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The mass production of celebrity

‘Celetoids’, reality TV and the ‘demotic turn’

The University of Queensland, Australia, graeme.turner{at}uq.edu.au

In Understanding Celebrity, I coined the term ‘the demotic turn’ as a means of characterizing the increasing production of ‘ordinary’ celebrities through reality TV and DIY celebrity websites. Refusing the idea that this necessarily constituted a democratizing process - hence the term ‘demotic’ - I wanted to examine the role that the access to mass-mediated fame plays within the construction of cultural identities. In this article, I develop this idea a little further by asking whether the shrinking distance between TV and ‘reality’, and between the famous and the ‘ordinary’, means that we need to reconsider our understandings of what kind of cultural apparatus the media has become.

Key Words: celebrity • cultural identity • media • reality TV

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