Theory Of Stardom - Richard Dyers

Star vs Celebrities

The difference between a celebrity and a star. A celebrity are individuals that are famously know locally instead. While a Star is a individual that is known world wide famously for their talent.   

Theory of stardom, this theory refers to the commodities manufactured by institutions. Dyers believe that celebrities are constructed to represent 'real people' experiencing real emotions in order to relate to the audience.

Example:

Stephen Curry, an NBA player, is a celebrity because he is well known only to people who play/watch Basket Ball but not worldwide, while Michael Jordan is a Star, because he is well known to be the best Basketball player worldwide.

Reasons why  are interested in celebrities:

Love - We are intrigued with the love life of the celebrities and stars, we could also feel a romantic relationship with them

Ordinariness - We like to see them do things that we do regularly, living normal lives which we could relate to.

Success - We like the idea of overnight success, and failure before success. 

Consumption - Audience are fascinated by the huge material wealth brought by media success (e.g. Luxury homes, cars, holidays, expensive fashion, dietary regimes by expensive nutritionist, etc)

Dream turned sour (downfall) - Audience enjoy tearing celebrities down more than we want to build them up. The audience enjoy their misery

Reel Persona and Real Persona

Reel persona, the performance of celebrities while at work. An example of Reel persona can be seen by many different celebrities, Actors this would be .Real persona, Their image outside of work.

Case Study - Aceu (Brandon Winn)

Brandon "Aceu" Winn is a retired American player who is currently playing as a streamer for an organization call NRG. He was a former Counter Strike: Global offensive player.

Reel Persona - This is the image which Aceu shows while 'working'. He shows this image through his YouTube videos, interviews, streaming.

Real Persona - This is the image of Aceu shows while outside of 'work'. He shows this image through another streamers channels, interviews, award ceremonies, documentary, etc.

Love

Aceu is currently in a relationship with 39daph (Daphne Wai) since the beginning of 2021. Before it was officially announced by the streamers, their audience were already speculating that they were in a relationship since they were appearing live at the same time living in the same place together.

Ordinariness

Even thought Aceu is well known to be insane at every FPS games he plays, and also a really chill person. He can also sometimes miss some shots which mean that he doesn't always hit his shots which which makes everyone think that he's also just a normal person, not an aiming machine. Even though he's very chill, he can also be seen raging when he plays games, but rarely and not excessively like some people, which makes his audience feel that even though he's very calm he can still get angry.

Success

Aceu grew up in a small town where there wasn’t much to do. His stepfather played a lot a lot of Quake and Counter-Strike 1.6, so Aceu spent a lot of time watching his stepfather play when he was little. When his stepfather felt he was old enough, he invited Aceu to start playing Quake with him and his friends. He returned to PC gaming after his stepfather gave aceu his old computer when he bought himself a new one. This was largely due to the growing popularity of pre-season League of Legends (LoL) and his friends’ interest in it. He made it to diamond by season 4 and then started playing Counter-Strike: Global Offensive (CS:GO) in 2015. He quickly addicted to it and spent most of his free time grinding it and managed to reach Global within the first 100 hours of playing in matchmaking with his friends. He created his ESEA account in September 2016 in order to play pubs. Soon afterwards, one of the people that he met on the site offered to introduce him to EclipseGG. They performed well and attracted the attention of Rise Nation, who offered both him and @Moose a better deal to join their team. They were then bought by eUnited in March 2018 and remained with them until January 2019, when they benched him. While aceu was looking for another team, he decided to start streaming on Twitch and began playing Apex Legends when it released in February 2019, as he was feeling burnt out after grinding CS:GO for so long and saw Apex as an opportunity to try out something different. He slowly transitioned into predominantly streaming apex rather than CS:GO and then signed on with NRG Esports in March 2019 as part of their Apex Legends team.

Consumption

The media has published different products which Aceu uses, such as his gaming mouse, keyboard, monitor, mousepad. The public is always up to date with his consumption.

Dreams turned sour (Downfall)

 

So far Aceu has not met with his downfall yet.