Our idea of celebrity has been handed down to us through the legacy of Hollywood. The red carpets, limos and champagne have become well-worn clichés that are parodied by reality TV and other media. Today’s stars are as likely to resemble the boy or girl next door as a god or goddess gazing at the skies in the style of Alexander the Great. Furthermore, they are emerging, increasingly, not through the celestial realm of cinema, but through a webcam in somebody’s bedroom.
Back in the 1950s, a psychiatrist and a sociologist came up with the concept of ‘parasocial interaction’ (Horton and Wohl 1956). They described this as a kind of illusory relationship that the public strikes up with ‘media figures’ — people appearing in various media. At the time, they were particularly interested in an American radio show called The Lonesome Gal in which a seductive-sounding young woman complained about her lack of a love life, and received sackloads of marriage offers from male listeners each week.
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