Fifteen minutes of fame

15 minutes of fame is short-lived, often ephemeral, media publicity or celebrity of an individual or phenomenon. The expression was coined by Andy Warhol, who said in 1968 that "In the future, everyone will be world-famous for 15 minutes." The phenomenon is often used in reference to figures in the entertainment industry or other areas of popular culture, such as reality TV and YouTube. It is believed that the statement was an adaptation of a theory of Marshall McLuhan, explaining the differences of media, where TV differs much from other media using contestants.

The age of reality television has seen the comment wryly updated as: "In the future, everyone will be obscure for 15 minutes." The British artist Banksy has made a sculpture of a TV that has, written on its screen, "In the future, everyone will be anonymous for 15 minutes."
A more recent adaptation of Warhol's quip, possibly prompted by the rise of online social networking, blogging, and similar online phenomena, is the claim that "In the future, everyone will be famous to fifteen people" or, in some renditions, "On the Web, everyone will be famous to fifteen people". This quote, though attributed to David Weinberger, was said to have originated with the Scottish artist Momus.

Theories

I have been researching different theories that I can relate to my research:

Hegemony
Cultural hegemony is the philosophic and sociological theory, by the Marxist philosopher Antonio Gramsci, that a culturally diverse society can be dominated (ruled) by one social class, by manipulating the societal culture (beliefs, explanations, perceptions, values) so that its ruling-class worldview is imposed as the societal norm, which then is perceived as a universally valid ideology and status quo beneficial to all of society, whilst benefiting only the ruling class.

Dominant Ideologies
The dominant ideology, in Marxist theory, is the set of common values and beliefs shared by most people in a given society, framing how the majority think about a range of topics. The dominant ideology is understood in Marxism to reflect, or serve, the interests of the dominant class in that society - if the dominant ideology conflicted with the legitimacy of the dominant class's rule, then society would have to be in a state of war with itself, with the dominant class appearing as an illegitimate occupation. This theory is summarized in the slogan: The dominant ideology is the ideology of the dominant class.
One way to understand Marxist revolutionary praxis is that it seeks to achieve just that situation of social unrest in which the ruling class is seen as illegitimate - a necessary precursor to achieving the aim of overthrowing the dominant class of capitalism, the bourgeoisie. The ideology of the working class has to achieve dominance, in order for the working class to become the dominant class.

Socio Economics
A branch of economics that focuses on the relationship between social behavior and economics. Social economics examines how social norms, ethics and other social philosophies that influence consumer behavior shape an economy, and uses history, politics and other social sciences to examine potential results from changes to society or the economy.

Consumer Choice
Consumer choice is a theory of microeconomics that relates preferences for consumption goods and services to consumption expenditures and ultimately to consumer demand curves. The link between personal preferences, consumption, and the demand curve is one of the most closely studied relations in economics. Consumer choice theory is a way of analyzing how consumers may achieve equilibrium between preferences and expenditures by maximizing utility as subject to consumer budget constraints.
Preferences are the desires by each individual for the consumption of goods and services that translate into choices based on income or wealth for purchases of goods and services to be combined with the consumer's time to define consumption activities.
Consumption is separated from production, logically, because two different consumers are involved. In the first case consumption is by the primary individual; in the second case, a producer might make something that he would not consume himself. Therefore, different motivations and abilities are involved.
The models that make up consumer theory are used to represent prospectively observable demand patterns for an individual buyer on the hypothesis of constrained optimization.
Prominent variables used to explain the rate at which the good is purchased (demanded) are the price per unit of that good, prices of related goods, and wealth of the consumer.
The fundamental theorem of demand states that the rate of consumption falls as the price of the good rises. This is called the substitution effect. Clearly if one does not have enough money to pay the price then they cannot buy any of that item. As prices rise, consumers will substitute away from higher priced goods and services, choosing less costly alternatives. Subsequently, as the wealth of the individual rises, demand increases, shifting the demand curve higher at all rates of consumption. This is called the income effect. As wealth rises, consumers will substitute away from less costly inferior goods and services, choosing higher priced alternatives

Reality TV

Reality television is a genre of television programming that presents purportedly unscripted dramatic or humorous situations, documents actual events, and usually features ordinary people instead of professional actors, sometimes in a contest or other situation where a prize is awarded. The genre, which has existed in some form or another since the early years of television programming, exploded as a phenomenon around 1999–2000 with the success of such television series such as Big Brother and Survivor. Programmes in the reality television genre are commonly called reality shows and often are produced in a television series.

Reality TV today has become the most popular type of show and there are now many sub-genres for reality television such as:

Documentary style

Competition/Game show

Self improvement/makeover

Renovation

Social Experiment

Hidden cameras

Supernatural and paranormal

Hoaxes

Media Representation

Representation refers to the construction in any medium (especially the mass media) of aspects of ‘reality’ such as people, places, objects, events, cultural identities and other abstract concepts. Such representations may be in speech or writing as well as still or moving pictures.The term refers to the processes involved as well as to its products. For instance, in relation to the key markers of identity - Class, Age, Gender and Ethnicity (the 'cage' of identity) - representation involves not only how identities are represented (or rather constructed) within the text but also how they are constructed in the processes of production and reception by people whose identities are also differentially marked in relation to such demographic factors. Consider, for instance, the issue of 'the gaze'. How do men look at images of women, women at men, men at men and women at women?



A key in the study of representation concern is with the way in which representations are made to seem ‘natural’. Systems of representation are the means by which the concerns of ideologies are framed; such systems ‘position’ their subjects.
Semiotics and content analysis (quantitative) are the main methods of formal analysis of representation.

• Semiotics foregrounds the process of representation.
• Reality is always represented - what we treat as 'direct' experience is 'mediated' by perceptual codes. Representation always involves 'the construction of reality'.
• All texts, however 'realistic' they may seem to be, are constructed representations rather than simply transparent 'reflections', recordings, transcriptions or reproductions of a pre-existing reality.
• Representations which become familiar through constant re-use come to feel 'natural' and unmediated.
• Representations require interpretation - we make modality judgements about them.
• Representation is unavoidably selective, foregrounding some things and backgrounding others.
• Realists focus on the 'correspondence' of representations to 'objective' reality (in terms of 'truth', 'accuracy' and 'distortion'), whereas constructivists focus on whose realities are being represented and whose are being denied.
• Both structuralist and poststructuralist theories lead to 'reality' and 'truth' being regarded as the products of particular systems of representation - every representation is motivated and historically contingent.

Jade Goody

I have been focusing on Jade Goody as research for my Essay question (How celebrities are represented in the media?) The reason I have been focusing on Jade Goody in particular is because she was a face that was always popping up in the media since she gained her five minutes of fame from the reality TV show Big Brother.


Who is Jade Goody?
Jade Goody became known to the public in 2002 when she took part in the third series of Big Brother and became the 'gossip' what everyone had assumed would be 15 minutes. Both Jades parents were drug addicts and she soon became irresistible to the media. They denounced her for her loudness ("Lob the gob!"), for being overweight (references to "Miss Piggy" abounded) and, after a now-infamous conversation with another housemate about whether "East Angular" was abroad, for being thick. Many of the broadsheets deplored her vulgarity and the high profile she was gaining despite her lack of talent.

By 2007 she had created something from nothing so successfully, Because of this she was invited to take part in that year's Celebrity Big Brother. The show that made her, however, was almost to break her. She became embroiled in the racist bullying of fellow contestant and Bollywood star Shilpa Shetty, referring to her as "Shilpa Poppadom" and "Shilpa Fuckawallah."

Her actions looked bad and it was bad. The media started tearing down the woman they had built up. Goody's gob, the absence of a filter between her mouth and her brain that had been so instrumental to her popularity, now appeared to have undone her.

Goody was diagnosed with cervical cancer in August 2008. It spread rapidly and she died at home and in her sleep. Leaving behind her two sons and a husband, Jack Tweed, whom she married four weeks before her death.


Here is part of an article that is suggesting why Jade Goody was so popular with the public:
"Because despite the supposed democratisation of television, the truly uneducated, those marked by true poverty and deprivation, rarely appear in our light entertainment schedules. And suddenly, there was Jade, an unapologetic and unadorned symbol of all sorts of uncomfortable truths that we choose to face through the occasional well-chosen documentary.

What the media reaction showed was quite how far we had yet to travel down the road towards social equality. Because Jade wasn't thick. The street smarts she would show in managing her subsequent career would be proof of that. She was woefully uneducated, but damning the school system that left her unable to decide whether Rio de Janeiro was a place or a person wouldn't have made such good copy. First she was failed by her family, then by the school system and then by the collective imagination.

Then things took a turn for the ­better. The broadsheets got bored or gave up in weary resignation, and the red tops began to change their tune.

Partly it was because they overshot the mark and their anti-Jade tone became so strident that it started to create a backlash towards her. And partly it was because they realised that she fascinated people and that the longer she stayed in the house, the more papers she would shift.

Why did Jade exert a fascination? At one level, as she would say herself, she offered ordinary people hope that they too could become celebrities. "They look at me and think, 'If she can do it, I can do it'." The press underestimated the power of this identification.

Again, because they are so rarely seen in public life it is easy to forget that the people in this country for whom Jade was a peer, not an affront, are in the vast majority. Maybe they won't have quite her litany of childhood abuses and difficulties, but her experience was still closer to the experience of the many than the lives we usually see held up for examination in public.

On another level, it was because Jade herself was a compelling presence. She was unfailingly natural, guileless, open, funny and charismatic. It is tempting to say that she had star quality – a domestic, downmarket version of what we usually mean by that, but star quality nevertheless. Certainly it has proved impossible for others to replicate so far.

That Goody was incapable of artifice or evasion was at first her greatest strength, resulting in continued popularity and lucrative deals for magazine columns, fragrances, exercise DVDs and ghosted autobiographies that netted her an estimated £4m over the next five years or so."

http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2009/mar/22/lucy-mangan-on-jade-goody




"Jade Goody has her own place in the history of television and, while it's significant, it's nothing to be proud of. Her death is as sad as the death of any young person, but it's not the passing of a martyr or a saint or, God help us, Princess Di," - 

Sir Michael Parkinson- The Telegraph 07 Apr 2009

"When we clear the media smoke screen from around her death what we're left with is a woman who came to represent all that's paltry and wretched about Britain today. She was brought up on a sink estate, as a child came to know both drugs and crime, was barely educated, ignorant and puerile. Then she was projected to celebrity by Big Brother and from that point on became a media chattel to be manipulated and exploited till the day she died." -

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/telegraphtv/5035803/VIDEO-EMBED-The-rise-of-Jade-Goody.html

11:48am UK, Tuesday April 07, 2009

Alex Watts,Sky News Online

Sir Michael Parkinson has savaged the publicity surrounding Jade Goody - saying she was no Princess Diana, and represented "all that is wretched about Britain today".

The chat show legend made his remarks just days after the reality TV star was buried at a church in Buckhurst Hill, Essex, with giant screens relaying the service to tearful crowds outside.

"I feel sorry for the poor girl. I think she was totally exploited from the moment she went on Big Brother," he told Sky News Online.

"I thought it was very poor, I thought the people who did that should be ashamed of themselves.

"I have been a journalist for 60 years and I am appalled by what's happened to my profession, she was exploited mercilessly by the media."

Jade's funeral

Thousands lined the streets and left floral tributes to pay their respects to the 27-year-old as her funeral cortege made its way from Bermondsey, south London, where she was born.

Newspaper reports said the outpouring of grief and sea of flowers had echoes of Princess Diana's funeral.

But Sir Michael said: "Jade Goody has her own place in the history of television and, while it's significant, it's nothing to be proud of.

"Her death is as sad as the death of any young person, but it's not the passing of a martyr or a saint or, God help us, Princess Di."

The 74-year-old added: "When we clear the media smoke screen from around her death what we're left with is a woman who came to represent all that's paltry and wretched about Britain today.

Jade Goody's Funeral 

Find out all the details about the ceremony

"She was brought up on a sink estate, as a child came to know both drugs and crime, was barely educated, ignorant and puerile.

"Then she was projected to celebrity by Big Brother and from that point on became a media chattel to be manipulated and exploited till the day she died."

He added: "What bothers me is that the media first of all recommended we hate Jade Goody - 'a slapper with a face like a pig', remember? - and shortly thereafter tried to persuade us to celebrate her."

He also pointed to role models that people should aspire to - rather than people who had just become famous through reality TV shows.

"Certain people gift you ambition," he added.

"When I saw Tom Graveney I wanted to be a professional cricketer. When I first set eyes on Ingrid Bergman in Casablanca I wanted to marry her.

"And seeing Alan Whicker on television gave me the idea that a life in telly might be fun," he said, adding: "One out of three ain't bad."

::Jade Goody has won a posthumous award as the Ultimate Reality Star at a ceremony in London.   

Celebrity representation

A Celebrity culture is an environment that influences people to do something on a media platform to become a celebrity. Celebrity status can come after any type of medium vehicle; reality television is one of the main types, as reality television such as Big Brother actively encourages fame with the public viewing them on the TV. Celebrities have now become the key way that health advice is dismissed through. If we look at Jade Goody she kept her life in the public eye, when she found out that she had cervical cancer, the rise in cancer swabs went up by 40%. Bob Greene states that with reality TV, someone can become a public person just by being a person, in public.

Celebrities are compared to royalty with their fame. The public have a curiosity about celebrities private life and love affairs. The public are invited into many celebrities lives if we look at people like Amy Whinehouse and Jade Goody they bring the public into everything they do. The public seemed to build a love/hate relationship with celebrities. If a celebrity is creating or having a lot of bad press, this can help build a career with the public forming onto the celebrities side and not the media.

Tabloid magazines and television talk shows creates controversially and attention for celebrities. To stay in the public front and to obtain a new venture, celebrities are participating into business ventures such as autobiographies, perfume and clothing ranges. Public curiosity about the lives of celebrities, keeps their appearance in magazines, television and night club opening nights.

ARTICLE

Looking at a large number of texts dealing with the same subject – celebrity – enables us to detect common themes and narratives (stories), to the extent that with enough repetition we become able to talk about the representation of that subject. Working through a large number of texts about celebrities, we become aware of common themes. The stress is overwhelmingly on relationships, consumption and leisure, and work is quite minor. This is part of the establishment of a form of para-social intimacy (Horton and Wohl, 1993) with the celebrity. We learn about the kinds of things we would otherwise know only about people who really were our friends. Celebrity is depicted most consistently (that is, it is a pervasive image) as a matter of enhanced opportunities for sex and romance.

http://openlearn.open.ac.uk/mod/oucontent/view.php?id=399080&section=2.3

Related article : Celetoid culture: Supply, demand and how we become celebrity junkies

http://thecommunicationspace.com/forum/topics/celetoid-culture-supply-demand

What is fashion? [session 5]

• Fashion is a statement of ones individuality
• Art
• Diverse
• Expressive
• Time line
• Trend
• Religion/culture
• Sexual advertisements
• Status, wealth, personality- Labels
• Gender identity
• Non verbal communication
• Performance of identity

Fashion is NOT:

• Limited or restricted
• Always accepted
• clothing

Charles Frederick Worth
Charles was born in England and worked in several London drapery shops before moving to Paris, the fashion capital in 1846, where he made his mark on the fashion industry. Worth is seen as the first fashion designer and is credited as the first fashion designer to put labels onto the clothing. he manufactured. Worth gave his customers luxurious materials and meticulous fit. He completely revolutionised the business of dressmaking. He was the first of the couturiers, dressmakers considered artists rather than mere artisans. Worth was also responsible for the development of the first fashion magazine. By the 1860's stylish women could see original designs by Worth in a publication Harpers Bazaar. As new designers appeared, their designs and creations could also be seen in the new fashion magazines. By the turn of the twentieth century, this was the primary method of spreading the news of the fashion trends in Paris. At first, the gowns were illustrated with drawings, but as photography developed and became more sophisticated in the early twentieth century, the fashion press used more and more photographs of new designs. At the same time, fashion and art were merging. These artists not only painted, but also created textile designs and fashion illustrations. Until the Second World War, even mainstream fashion journals like Vogue and Vanity Fair continued to publish fashion illustration by modern artists, encouraging the connections between fashion designers and visual artists. Charles Frederick Worth also introduced the first couture house. Haute Couture' is the French word for the highest, most exclusive work a big fashion house produces

Paul Poiret was a French fashion designer. His contributions to twentieth-century fashion have been likened to Picasso's contributions to twentieth-century art. Poiret moved to the House of Worth, where he was responsible for designing simple, practical dresses. Poiret established his own house in 1903, and made his name with the controversial kimono coat. Though perhaps best known for freeing women from corsets and for his original inventions including hobble skirts. The simplicity of his clothing represented a "pivotal moment in the emergence of modernism" generally, and "effectively established the paradigm of modern fashion, irrevocably changing the direction of costume history.

What is Fashion Design?

• A system of signs, symbols and iconography 

that non-verbally communicates meanings 

about individuals and groups

• Largely used to express individual identity

• Capitalism/Consumption

• Ethics

• Power

• Gender Identity- through fashion plays with the stereotyped way of portraying male and female as well as the challenges to the dominant ideologies that are conveyed by the signs of the body.

• Identity- the visible performance of out outward identity

• The Body

• Response to politics


Werner Sombart takes the view that spending (especially by women) on luxuries such as clothing for conspicuous consumption are a significant part, and has been a key feature of capitalism ever since its original accumulation phase. "Fashion is capitalism's favourite child."

What is Graphic Design? [session 3&4]

Graphic design is a multi media practice and a way of translating words.

A sign is : "something which stands to somebody for something in some capacity" - Charles Sanders Pierce,1977.

There are many signs and visual forms of communication that are universal, for example the signs male and female signs.
Men are symbolised by a jutting arrow, an age-old instrument of war.Women are signified by a cross, a design used on battlefields around the globe to identify non-combatants who bravely work to tend the wounded. Our similarities are more important than our differences. The circle symbolises both men and women. That shows we all have the potential to be whole, rounded human beings.
  
These signs have been constructed and learnt, they are not common sense which some people mistake the understanding of them for.

Paolo Uccello, The Battle of San Romano, 1438-40 

This image is one of the first images that had an indication of geomatary as the eye is bought in through the image. Paolo Ucello was developing an intense interest in perspective under the influence of Masaccio’s and Donatello’s works, he became engrossed with developing the new science of perspective in painting. 

Visual communication is the communication of ideas through the visual display of information. Primarily associated with two dimensional images, it includes: art, signs, photography, typography, drawing fundamentals, colour and electronic resources. Recent research in the field has focused on web design and graphically oriented usability. It is part of what a graphic designer does to communicate visually with the audience.
Human communication was revolutionized with speech approximatley 200,000 years ago. Symbols were developed about 30,000 years ago, and writing about 7,000. On a much shorter scale, there have been major developments in the field of telecommunication in the past few centuries.

CAVE PAINTINGS

The begginings of creative practices originated from Cave Paintings.

Cave or rock paintings are paintings painted on cave or rock walls and ceilings, usually dating to prehistoric times. Rock paintings are made since the Upper Paleolithic, 40,000 years ago. It is widely believed that the paintings are the work of respected elders or shamans.


PETROGLYPHS

Petroglyphs are images incised in rock, usually by prehistoric, especially Neolithic, peoples. They were an important form of pre-writing symbols, used in communication from approximately 10,000 B.C. to modern times, depending on culture and location. Many petroglyphs are thought to represent some kind of not-yet-fully understood symbolic or ritual language.

GEOGLYPHS

Geoglyphs are drawings on the ground, or a large motif, (generally greater than 4 metres) or design produced on the ground, either by arranging clasts (stones, stone fragments, gravel or earth) to create a positive geoglyph or by removing patinated clasts to expose unpatinated ground. Some of the most famous negative geoglyphs are the Nazca Lines in Peru. Other areas with geoglyphs include Western Australia and parts of the Great Basin Desert in SW United States. Hill figures, turf mazes and the stone-lined labyrinths of Scandinavia, Iceland, Lappland and the former Soviet Union are types of geoglyph. The largest geoglyph is the Marree Man in South Australia.

PICTOGRAMS, IDEOGRAMS AND LOGOGRAMS

A pictogram or pictograph is a symbol representing a concept, object, activity, place or event by illustration. Pictography is a form of writing whereby ideas are transmitted through drawing. It is the basis of cuneiform and hieroglyphs. Early written symbols were based on pictograms (pictures which resemble what they signify) and ideograms (pictures which represent ideas). It is commonly believed that pictograms appeared before ideograms. They were used by various ancient cultures all over the world since around 9000 BC and began to develop into logographic writing systems around 5000 BC. Pictograms are still in use as the main medium of written communication in some non-literate cultures in Africa, The Americas, and Oceania, and are often used as simple symbols by most contemporary cultures.

An ideogram or ideograph is a graphical symbol that represents an idea, rather than a group of letters arranged according to the phonemes of a spoken language, as is done in alphabetic languages. Examples of ideograms include wayfinding signage, such as in airports and other environments where many people may not be familiar with the language of the place they are in, as well as Arabic numerals and mathematical notation, which are used worldwide regardless of how they are pronounced in different languages. The term "ideogram" is commonly used to describe logographic writing systems such as Egyptian hieroglyphs and Chinese characters. However, symbols in logographic systems generally represent words or morphemes rather than pure ideas.

A logogram, or logograph, is a single grapheme which represents a word or a morpheme (a meaningful unit of language). This stands in contrast to other writing systems, such as alphabets, where each symbol (letter) primarily represents a sound or a combination of sounds.

The way that things were produced were limited by technology until the invention of mechanical movable type printing led to an explosion of printing activities in Europe within only a few decades. As early as 1480, there were printers active in 110 different places in Germany, Italy, France, Spain, the Netherlands, Belgium, Switzerland, England, Bohemia and Poland. From that time on, it is assumed that "the printed book was in universal use in Europe." The industrial revolution introduced more leisure time. It was not long before images were generated such as fashion images which had a huge impact on fashion design. However generated art was seen as distasteful and soulless because it was processed by a machine. 

Arts and Crafts movement was an international design philosophy that originated in England and flourished between 1860 and 1910, continuing its influence until the 1930s.It was largely a reaction against the impoverished state of the decorative arts and the conditions by which they were produced.

Paul Rand was an American graphic designer, best known for his corporate logo designs. He started to produce images that  challenged the way we see things. Graphic design was suddenly understood to be able to manipulate meanings it was seen as futurist art playing with contemporary and moving away from tradition.

Graphic design is meant sell products and services and make people buy them and which can sometimes involve selling a lifestyle. Where as information design is easily understood to send a particular message.

Is it possible to asses the quality or understand a piece of graphic design?

• The context is crucial 
• culture comfort zone
• different audiences
• The impact of the image 
• Graphic designs job is to communicate as opposed to certain fine art which is based on our own interpretations.

There have been many critical responses to the 2012 Olympic logo, comments about the logo have suggested that the logo is unimaginative and too much to take in with the various shapes colours and information the logo is giving. The internet and news are full of controversies relating to the poor design of the logo. The jagged emblem, based on the date 2012, comes in a series of shades of pink, blue, green and orange. The brand identity was designed by Wolff Olins and the following statement has been published on the official 2012 Olympics website:

"The number 2012 is our brand. It is universal and understandable worldwide.

Our emblem is simple, distinct, bold and buzzing with energy. Its form is inclusive yet consistent and has incredible flexibility to encourage access and participation. It can communicate with anyone from commercial organisations to kids playing sport. It feels young in spirit. Full of confidence, certainty and opportunity. Not afraid to shake things up, to challenge the accepted. To change things."