I propose to focus on the nature of tabloid blog-sites, otherwise referred to as celebrity gossip forums. Recently there has emerged a tremendous popularity among sites such as PerezHilton.com, Defamer.com, and http://www.x17online.com, which offer the latest celebrity buzz – from couple’s news to personal struggles with substance abuse. These web pages offer a number of daily blogging, with recent updates, and may in fact be perceived as the unedited versions of magazines such as US Weekly, Star, and In Touch.
While I am afraid to admit that I have a history of being addicted to tabloid buzz and celebrity gossip, I also find it fascinating that there exist people in this world with such a deep passion and obsession with this subject, spending countless hours updating personal sites with information regarding Britney Spears’ or Paris Hilton’s latest mishaps. This concept connects to those displayed in our first class reading assignments, “Portrait of the Blogger as a Young Man,” and “You’ve Got Blog: How to Put Your Boyfriend, Your Business, and Your Life On-Line.” I hope to gain a deeper understanding of why one’s blogging fetish may form into an obsession that feeds into the addiction of our society at large.
I plan to examine both the perspective of the site blogger, and that of the web surfer, particularly in the domain of these celebrity fan forums. I will relate my findings to the information offered in our reading assignments that regard the subject of daily and occupational blogging. Most significantly, through my research I plan to discover evidence that reveals the skyrocketing population of these celebrity gossip blogs, and will continue to question whether or not someday these blog-sites will overpower and take the place of celebrity gossip magazines.
I think you should also discuss the speed at which people can find out about their favorite celebrities. Allnighter's blog about the death of Anna Nicole Smith makes good mention about how the general public can find out about breaking celebrity news. Fans can find things out instantaneously nowadays without having to wait for the next newscast, newspapers, or weekly magazines.
...Of course, the whole world could have found out and saw video of Britney Spears as soon as she shaved her head.
You just commented to post that link ;)
Your last sentence interests me because whenever I watch like Best Week Ever, they always introduce the celebrity gossip like "____ was quoted in Vanity Fair of allegedly blah blah blah"
It's always a magazine, and I wonder why a blog is never mentioned.
Thank you guys for some of the helpful suggestions and comments thus far. Its funny you mention Britney's shaved head, because that is actually what further motivated me to focus my project on gossip blogs. I have spent the past few days home sick in LA, and have spent much of my time on the computer. I literally found out about the shaved head incident right after it happened, when my friend sent me the link to a popular blog site. It was not until the next morning when I turned on the TV and I saw it on the news...and of course it will not be until the next issues of popular tabloids hitting newstands that the story will be offered. From this I think it is really important to focus on the dominance of blog sites and their continuing development in our society.
This sounds like a good project! There are huge numbers of such celebrity blogs (my personal favorite being Go Fug Yourself), and they certainly do suggest something about our celebrity-obsessed culture. My only concern, I suppose, is that the amount of the material available to you could make your project wind up pretty superficial -- more descriptive than analytical. You'll almost certainly want to focus in on one site in particular, as a representative example of the phenomenon, so that you can explore it in more depth...
This may be a counterproductive comment if KF is suggesting a narrower focus rather than a broader one, but here's one more point of view of this that I find most fascinating: In what ways has this online gossip culture intruded on or violated rights of the celebrities? I find it impossible to feel sorry for the tabloid targets such as Spears, but recall how the public lashed out against the paparazzi after Princess Diana's death in 1997. It's a nasty industry, and the blog culture only increases its demand for sleeziness and unsubstatiated "reporting."