As an avid follower of celebrity gossip, I can tell you the daily Starbucks runs of Britney Spears, the latest celebrity divorce or Anna Nicole Smith lawsuit, and that dubious new fellow Lindsay Lohan met in rehab and is now dating. I get my daily (sometimes hourly) fix from Dlisted.com, the (even more!) outlandish alternative of celebrity gossip blog to PerezHilton.com. Dlisted features many sections dedicated to widely written celebrities, giving unique nicknames to each celebrity. Paris Hilton is Parasite Hilton, and Sarah Jessica Parker is My Little Pony Parker, to mention a few of the nicer nicknames. When there is a lack of gossip, the website will display recent pictures of a celebrity and analyze their external appearance. The blog also features a contest for the blog visitors to come up with a clever caption for wacky photographs, a message board, and a daily list of celebrities who have birthdays that day. The blogger gives his name as Michael K, but little information past that. Through his commentary, we learn that he is 28 years old, lives in New York City and is openly gay.
According to the Brunswickian Lens, people produce "personality by-products" whereby they generate artifacts and behave in ways that reflect their true personalities. This means that the sarcasm, cattiness, and superficiality Michael K portrays as part of his celebrity gossip website reflects characteristics he possesses in his true self. If I perceive the cues Michael K sends out as him being a superficial person (cue utilization) and it is found that Michael K is actually superficial (cue validity), then functional achievement occurs.
After searching around the Internet, I found Michael K had a MySpace, which allowed me to determine more information about him. The Myspace is chock-full of other-directed identity claims, which are claims Michael makes to his Myspace audience, presumably those that know him through his website, that he would like the audience to know about him. On his MySpace, Michael K lists his favorite music, television shows, movies, as well as his height, hometown and the fact that he is divorced. In addition, Michael has a link on his main MySpace to another one of his MySpace pages, in which you have to be approved by Michael K to view. This is presumably a personal MySpace page, intended for an audience of intimate friends. The link on his main page to a personal page is a self-directed identity claim. Since a self-identity claim is a symbolic statement made for an individual's benefit to re-enforce their self views, the link on his main website to his private website perhaps reminds Michael K that even though he is a well known web-celebrity, he has his personal life off the Internet too. Since his intimate MySpace link isn't open to the public, most likely Michael K posted the link for his own self-image.
In addition to identity claims, there are many internal and external behavioral residues left by Michael K both in his Dlisted blog and MySpace. It is safe to assume that Michael K engages in many sources of Internet activity on the web, which define internal behavioral residues. Throughout the day, Dlisted is updated every couple of minutes, creating about 30 blog post items per day! Through these blog posts, the viewer is able to perceive Michael K's opinion on who is beautiful in Hollywood and who is not, who Michael K thinks is talented in Hollywood, as well as his raunchy, self-deprecating sense of humor. On Michael K's MySpace, external behavioral residues are visible. External behavioral residues are defined as behaviors performed by individuals entirely outside the surroundings. However, external residues can also be applied to social network web spaces to be defined as information left on an interactive web site by others about the profiler's behavior outside the web space. In his MySpace, most of the comments posted about Michael K are written by fans of his blog, gushing with admiration about his humor and wit on Dlisted. Although this is information posted by others, their comments do not reflect Michael K's behaviors outside the web space since none of the commenters know him on a personal level. By Googling his name however, I obtained a few interviews Michael K gave to other websites about how he started his blog, his favorite celebrity, and his hobbies outside of celebrity blogging. By giving an interview to outside sources, external behavioral residual cues remained.
In terms of the five factors, I would say Michael K is not as open as other bloggers. Although I agree that he needs a level of secrecy since his website encounters a broad audience, he is loath to discuss his personal life when talking about celebrities. Besides making comments indicating his sexual orientation, Michael K never talks about where he grew up, what kind of family he has, or life experiences. While other bloggers may relate celebrity news to their own life, Michael doesn't seem to be as open. Even in his MySpace, he doesn't reveal too much information and posts a few pictures that don't identify his appearance outwardly.
In terms of conscientiousness,
Michael K seems to be extremely outspoken, lewd and therefore not very conscientious. However, his sense of humor and his website popularity reflect a conscientiousness
in that sense that he can deliver and satisfy the entertainment needs of many. Since he constantly updates his blog, he seems like a hard worker and conscientious in that way too. As far as being agreeable, Michael K doesn't seem to portray an agreeable person through his blog: he is quick to call those celebrities not immaculately polished (such as Tara Reid) "messes", those photographed with a bag of Cheetos as "gluttonous" (such as Britney Spears), calls out celebrities he thinks are too heavy or too thin (too many to name), those with opposing political beliefs as "nutcases" (such as the conservative views expressed by Patricia Heaton) or those with different religious views (such as Tom Cruise and Scientology) as "aliens." Clearly, Michael K does not seem to be an agreeable and open-minded person. In addition, Michael K seems extremely neurotic. His job consists of looking at celebrities and critiquing them either through their physical appearance or a newsworthy story posted about them. Michael K comes off as very critical of others, and includes many self-deprecating jokes about himself. In the About Me Section of Dlisted, Michael writes that he has no life and that "What he lacks for in brains he makes for in....um...he makes up for in....in....um...gummy bears...yeah that's the ticket."
4 comments:
I think that you really hit a lot of bases in this post, and think that you, overall, did an excellent job! You really incorporated a lot of what we have learned in class thus far, which is quite impressive! Well done!
I think that it is really quite interesting how Michael K. makes a leaving judging those that are highly exposed to culture, yet he does little that would expose himself. It seems like he is very careful to maintain his identity, and creates a persona for his online spaces that he keeps separate from his offline life. Considering that Michael K. does so carefully attempt to maintain his online image, it would be curious to see how reliable the cues are for determining his true personality. He clearly will present his internal behavioral cues as he wishes, and also seems to maintain a high level of control over the way external behavioral cues are presented. The combination of these two facts could lead to a very superficial, and highly controlled, impression formation.
Hey Talia,
Great job on your blog. I chose option number two as well and came to similar findings. When reading, I was a little confused by your analysis of the self-directed identity claim, but as I continued to read and thought about it, I quickly understood and feel you did well in linking his personal and more private life with a self-directed claim as opposed to his main website. In terms of the external/internal residue and the five factor model, you did a great job. Did Michael K's website have pictures of him in real life? Because those could also be considered external residue. Nice job.
Well done! It's really impressive that you applied so much information in your post.
For Michael K.'s case, due to the highly exposed-to-public nature of his blog, I assume that most of the information provided on his blog would be carefully picked and organized, which means, he takes highly control over all the information. Thus, I doublt if we can draw the picture out of him based on his blog.
Post a Comment