Lightning Talk
Tessa Joseph-Nicholas
Department of Computer Science
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Biography
Tessa Joseph-Nicholas is the Director of Digital Arts and Humanities Projects and Lecturer at the Department of Computer Science at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where she teaches courses on digital culture, cyberculture, and cyberethics.
Abstract
I would like to contribute a talk on Internet celebrity to HASTAC’s 2013 conference, focusing on the forms and strategies practiced by women. The presentation will draw on Richard Dyer’s and other previous scholars’ examinations of the way each era’s prevailing notions of, and fears about, womanhood and female sexuality are written on the bodies of its female stars, extending these ideas to born-online celebrities such as the “mommy bloggers” Dooce and Kerf and the writers/media figures Emily Gould and Julia Allison. I will discuss the ways established and aspiring stars employ social media to sell the experience of unmediated access to their private selves, the consequences and implications of these practices, and the unique contributions of Internet fan/hate communities and trolls to creating and sustaining this particular mode of celebrity.
In an age in which Hollywood’s most powerful female stars are increasingly media-savvy and self-protective—compare the wealth of domestic detail available about Angelina Jolie with the almost complete control she manages to exert over the means and content of the disclosed information—mommy bloggers’, lifecasters’, and social media celebrities’ appeal relies heavily on the level of intimate access they provide to their publics. I am interested in this exchange— intimate, private information for page views—in part because, like much that goes on online, it subverts the top-down means by which media objects and texts, including stars, have traditionally been created and promoted. The Internet, the story goes, democratizes self-invention, self- presentation, and fame, even stardom. However, this presentation will focus on the problematic ways in which the female body and experience are written via social media and the disturbingly reactionary patterns of “post-feminist” backlash that emerge in response to the success of these methods in, for example, communities like getoffmyinternets.net and rebloggingdonk.com.