Dishing Dirt in the Digital Age: Celebrity Gossip Blogs and Participatory Media Culture

摘要

In Dishing Dirt in the Digital Age, Erin Meyers presents an illustrative study of celebrity gossip blogs-the emergence of which has substantially altered the production, circulation, and reception of celebrity gossip media-as part of a larger scholarly project to better understand the possibilities and limitations of cultural production by consumers in a convergent and participatory culture (Jenkins, 2006). Drawing upon qualitative data collected through oral interviews, online surveys, and textual analysis from 2007 to 2009, Meyers closely examines the production and consumption of six advertiser-supported and American-based celebrity gossip blogs to argue for an understanding of celebrity gossip blogs as spaces for audiences to publicly intervene in the celebrity media system. Participation in these spaces allows active audiences to collectively negotiate the meanings and values of celebrities and produce alternatives to the hegemonic ideologies of gender, race, and sexuality offered by traditional celebrity media gossip outlets (Marshall, 1997; Turner, 2004). She specifically highlights the role of celebrity gossip bloggers, whose cultural production reveals the work of highly active audiences and the possibilities afforded by new media technology to incite structural changes in the celebrity gossip media system. Still, she carefully formulates her claims to acknowledge that this cultural production is neither entirely "new" nor without its own limitations. She explains that studies of online fandom must be wary of assuming all social activity in these spaces uniformly counts as participation in a community by drawing attention to stratified forms of audience engagement such as joining or merely reading conversations found on celebrity gossip blogs. In this way, she problematizes expectations that new media interactivity necessarily produces a participatory culture and demonstrates how the liberatory potential of audience cultural production is mitigated by the technological and social contexts in which it emerges.