Reflection Blog post

BCM212 Research project – Reflection on opinion piece: In Celebrity We Trust

In conducting my research, I began with a very unclear direction, this remained right up until I collected my survey data. I initially thought doing my research on celebrities would centre around their impact on social movements, like the #freebritney movement that inspired me to research celebrities in the first place. But, with a lot of reading, I couldn’t find a lot that exclusively talked about the Britney case, because it’s so recent, or that made sense with the description for the assignment. Alternatively, I decided to focus on celebrity impacts on their audience in general. I expected to write an opinion piece on how celebrities impacted students, estimating that I would end up talking about body-image or political opinions. However, upon receiving my results I was sparked inspiration to take a new direction. One student had the opinion of celebrities being ‘just like us’, this is a fair opinion to have. However, I personally find it very untrue, and lead me to research more into celebrity culture and its workings and found more inspiration from another student who credited celebrity’s validity as role models to their popularity, by societies standards. This point was the basis of my opinion piece, to provide a warning to the audience of the problems with equating celebrities as relatable and that critically analysing the celebrities, we consume should be a skill we all have to make informed opinions on the media personalities we’re involved with.

I wish I had included questions in my survey about whether students critically evaluate the celebrities they consume to have a more conclusive analysis, however I am confident in my own experience and knowledge from doing this degree that my fellow students would have similar ways of evaluating content as I have learnt to do in BCM.  My research would’ve also been made better if I were able to survey people outside of BCM, separately to compare notes, but this was not possible, so I had to draw conclusions from what I had access to. I also wish that I had managed my time a bit better, if I had collected my survey results earlier perhaps, I could have asked for interviews with students on their opinions regarding role models and critical evaluation in their celebrity consumption. Overall, I learned a lot about celebrities in this process and how they function and find myself more actively questioning certain claims and opinions promoted by celebrities.