'Celebrity has become industrialised'
Gamson talks about how we separate fame from achievement and how the link between the idea of status and excellence has never truly been absolute. Throughout the text he explores the idea of celebrity and out fascination with celebrity culture looking at reality TV stars and how they help to create the 'illusion of intimacy' and make us believe we are really viewing someone else's world.
He also looks at the idea of how stars are 'made' and the notion that 'those who posses star quality have it onstage and off'. Celebrities are used to sell things to us because they are instantly recognisable and this helps to a certain degree to boost their celebrity status.
Celebrities are a 'powerful elite: the media, the industry, the star-makers, are able to control images and are able to direct mass attention through marketing machinery'. In other words, beware...
Holmes and Redmond state that 'if you are not famous then you exist at the periphery of the power networks that circulate in and through the popular media' and the idea that if your not famous your largely responsible for making the famous so ridiculously famous by being fans.
The relationship between fans and celebrities is something Holmes and Redmond go onto explore in order to analyse fame and the idea that stars and celebrities stand in as surrogate friends and family to their fans.
They go on to talk about how we, as a society, talk about fans and how celebrity talk/gossip becomes part of our everyday activities where we often talk about them as if we actually know them based upon the information we gather about them from magazines, TV appearances, photos and interviews.
On the whole they explore out relationship with celebrities and the surrounding culture and how 'fame, like power, could be evenly distributed'. However this thought becomes void because 'if everyone were famous then no one would be famous' and the power relationship between fans and 'celebritisation' wouldn't exist.
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