Crafting and negotiating multiple identities through the Media Systems: in-depth interviews with Hong Kong Chinese Celebrities and Entertainment Industry Workers

Abstract

The media and entertainment industries constantly produce, commodify and institutionalize the charismatic (or profane) quality of celebrities in popular culture and society, in order to boost viewership and generate commercial success. To understand the symbolic power of celebrity and its boundaries, however, we must go beyond its economic functions and further investigate the dynamic identity construction process, its identification among public audiences, and how they adopt such celebrity signs to make sense of their social world (Marshall 1997: 43, 52). Celebrities cooperate and negotiate with the media system in constructing their multifaceted identities, defending their sociocultural values, political visions, personal benefits and public interests, and privacy. More frequent online interaction between the celebrity and the public further complicates this process. Celebrity, as an intertextual sign, is perceived by different audiences in polarized ways, and be discursively yet divergently constructed in various social contexts (Kapoor 2013; Rojek 2001; Shils, 2010; Turner; 2010; van Krieken 2012). By fathoming out the impact of the Hollywood culture and global creative industries to East Asia as well as the indigenous socioeconomic, historical, political, technological and cultural transformations, this paper presents findings from the researchers’ hard-to-come-by in-depth interviews with Chinese celebrities and entertainment industry workers respectively conducted in late 2014 and early 2015, and examines how these stars divergently construct and negotiate for multiple identities, particularly through the social media platforms, as a form of resistance towards the oppression of the local media system and commercial institutions on their subjectivity (Lind 2013; Marwick and boyd 2011).