Celebrities and Their Effects - Essay Example

Celebrities and their Effects Name Professor’s Name Date Introduction Discourse simply refers to the passage of related speeches or writings, but according to Michael Foucault, discourse is a way of presenting information about a specific topic at a particular time in history i.e. it all about the production of knowledge via language. Foucault also defined discourse as ways for constituting information, together with social practices, manifestations of subjectivity and power relations with such information and the relations between them. Discourses are more than ways for thinking and creating meaningful information, they constitute the "nature" of the body, oblivious and of the Cognizant’s of personality and enthusiastic life of the subjects they seek to legislate (Weedon, 1987, p. 108) The main background theme selected for the analysis of discourse and linguistic structures in this essay is “celebrity powers and their negative influences on teenagers” as explained and investigated by two authors. One of the authors, Gauna, explains that with the new technologies, media and the power of influence by celebs all over the world, teens can be easily manipulated and influenced to the liking of their respective celebrities. On the other hand, author David Robinson explains that information overload compels people to prefer one commodity from another. He argues that, the never ending different sources of niche would leave us absorbed and eventually isolated were it not for the power and influence of celebrities whom through the media and other platforms bring us together. Critical Discourse Analysis This essay also provides an illustration of how Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) can be used in the analysis of texts and information. By looking at the reportage of two authors, it can be demonstrated on how a number of linguistic concepts can be used to discuss the powers of celebrities and their negative influences on teens. Critical discourse analysis is a branch of linguistics which attempts to investigate how and why particular texts affect hearers and readers, the way they do. Through the examinations of grammar, CDA focuses on uncovering the hidden ideologies that can manipulate or influence the hearer or readers’ view of the world in general. Most of the common CDA tools and styles applied by the two above authors include transitivity, modality, negation, opposition, naming and nominalization. Media texts are a common subject of analysis in CDA. Here, two articles from two websites are explored. These articles consist of David Robinson’s Celebrity power published on his website and Gauna’s article on the negative influences on teens by celebrities. Both of these articles extensively analyze and explore their own views and perspectives of how celebrity powers influence and manipulate the society, particular the youngsters of this generation. Gauna’s statement that celebrities influence teens negatively is farfetched, as she doesn’t explain all the variables and information’s that guided her to reach this conclusion. She starts of by explaining that it’s due to technology that most celebrities get to influence teenagers. She asserts that this era of technology has provided people with easy access to everyone’s lives (mostly celebrities). Fans of respective celebs are able through technology to feel part of their adored idols’ everyday life by simply tracking their activities through Facebook or Twitter. This, asserts Gauna, will give fans a close connection and a feeling of familiarity to their favorite celebs. In reference to Gauna’s article, this statement “celebrities have the easiest time influencing teens because they are so vulnerable”. The CDA focus on this statement is the use of the word ‘so’ implying that teens are so weak against celebrity influences to the extent that they cannot help but just get influenced. She further states that teens strive to look ‘cool’ as their esteemed celebs. The word cool is used to create a good desirable look by the teens. The other important aspect to note in Gauna’s article is the manipulation of the research data from Teenage Research Unlimited; she assumes that the only thing teens are interested is fun, this manipulates readers and hearers to focus on the fun and celebrity part of information disregarding any intuition on the other ’fun ‘part of teenagers’ lives. Gauna stipulates that for instance, the fans of Miley Cyrus look up to only of the negative influences and disregard entirely the good influences of Miley Cyrus. She postulates that teens were caught smoking marijuana on film and that Lindsay Lohan and Paris Hilton went to jail for drinking and abusing drugs. The doesn’t provide an alternative as to why teens may abuse drugs other than because they copied what Miley Cyrus, Paris Hilton and Lindsay Lohan were doing. Analysis of Gauna’s CDAs Gauna has employed the word selection genre of linguistic selection in bringing out her message that it’s mainly celebrities who negatively influence teenagers. In reference to her statement “Teenagers are in search for self-esteem, their identity, and a “cool” self-image”, the word cool has been stipulated to imply the desirable self-image that celebrities portray. Another word she used was “smush” to show how rowdy teenagers can be. The generalization linguistic structure has been also employed to pass her information to hearers and readers. She has generalized that it’s all teenagers who prefer fun to other activities, that it’s all teenagers who idolize celebrities and that it’s all celebrities who provide only negative influences to teenagers. Labeling as a linguistic structure has been used by Gauna to show how powerful celebrities are by referring them to as idols. She assumes that teenagers adore and love their celebrities to the extent that they can worship or idolize them. This influences the hearers or readers on inherently believing that due to this “idolizing” teenagers can therefore be influenced easily. David Robinson on the other hand emphasizes that it’s the celebrity power awarded to them by various platforms is to blame on the negative influences in teenagers. According to him, the most adored celebs across the globe have immeasurable power of influencing and manipulating teens to their liking. This is because teens are easily manipulated due to their lack of high self-esteem and peer pressure from their friends and family. Celebrities who have more power obviously have a much higher capability to influence or manipulate as compared to celebrity with low levels of power. They look up to their celebrities for inspirations and an understanding into what they need to grow up to be. He further stipulated that, Teenagers are confounded with reference to who they are and who they need to be. Since youngsters are attempting to evaluate who they are and who they need to be, they look to the most prominent celebs. This is the place where celebrities have the most impact. With the new technologies and diversity of the media, institutions which generally relied to derive their power through one to many communication styles are highly challenged by the easiness with which regular individuals acting independently can command large audiences. Celebrities who acquire this kind of power have the capabilities to convert their fame into monetary terms and can also politically influence their society. New advances in technology provide for us an extensive variety of approaches to indulge ourselves in isolation. Tivo, the Web, and most prominently the iPod give solo encounters that are at any rate as alluring as customary socialization. They are, if anything, excessively great they pander to our individual tastes so well that we require not dedicate as much time to collective interests. Generally, individuals have normally imparted geographic nearness and social binds to their most quick social contacts. Anyhow numerous innovation watchers have recognized this evolving. It's tricky to visit about the climate with a Facebook "companion" who exists in an outside city, and church participation is on the decay. Main subjects in colleges are out of design. Every day papers, which once gave everybody nearby something to discuss, are quickly losing piece of the pie to more specific sources. Analysis of David Robinson’s CDAs Speech presentation has been extensively applied by David Robinson in putting across his message on the powers wielded by celebrities. One can decide to directly quote references or simply provide a flavor or summery of what was stipulated. One of the notable speech presentation provided by David is in reference to Daniel Boorstin is, “well known for their well-knownness” Conclusion This analysis of two distinct authors on the powers wielded by celebrities and their negative influences on teenagers demonstrates how critical discourse analysis can be applied in depth to examine languages. By analyzing generalization, naming, labeling, speech presentations and word selection, it was possible to deduce information as to the concepts underlying the two texts explored by both David Robinson and Gauna. They have explained that, famous people and celebrities have turned out to be into major influencers in our society than at any other time in the recent past. One of the fundamental purposes behind this is the way that famous people have gotten substantially broader, they could be any one or from anyplace. References Fairclough, N. (1989). Language and power. London: Longman. Fairclough, N. (1992). Discourse and social change. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press. Kress, G. R., & Leeuwen, T. (2001). Multimodal discourse: the modes and media of contemporary communication. London: Arnold ;. Leeuwen, T. (2008). Discourse and practice new tools for critical discourse analysis. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Renkema, J. (2009). Discourse, of course an overview of research in discourse studies. Amsterdam: John Benjamins Pub. Co.. Read More