The Case of Belle Gibson
In the following case study we see the negative effects of breaking down these barriers and not having the third party to censor the content that celebrities are publishing.
Annabelle Natalie “Belle” Gibson is a 24 year old blogger who claimed to have battled cancer through alternative medicine. She fabricated stories about how she self-treated her cancer by dieting. She also invented a Smartphone Application and wrote a book about her “healthy lifestyle”. She spread her “news” about being cured from cancer through Facebook and Instagram (on which she had 193.000 followers) where she had a huge fanbase (Ryal, 2015). Gibson became the Australians’ darling and was even voted the Elle magazine’s “most inspiring woman …show more content…
Her tweeting and posting on the Social Media channels created not just a celebrity, but an everybody’s darling type of girl, which ended up in a full sense of closeness from the audience side.
“Fraternization is the key because it denotes the impression of friendship, shared understanding, common ground and other features of reciprocity between the celebrity icon and the audience.” (Rojek, 2011, p.133)
The case of Belle Gibson is a concerning one, because we see how fast someone can make up a story and bring real people in danger just because they developed a para-social relationship with that someone. She gave her followers and cancer sufferer’s hope with her made up story. There is no ultimate number of people who were suffering from cancer and gave up conventional treatment to follow Gibson’s alternative path. But we can assume since she was hyped as a health warrior that there were a number of people doing so.
However, Horton and Whol already noted that vulnerable individuals are the most likely to get caught-up in extreme para-social relationships, Rojek (2012) describes how isolated individuals often experience the symptoms of the so called fame
In the following case study we see the negative effects of breaking down these barriers and not having the third party to censor the content that celebrities are publishing.
Annabelle Natalie “Belle” Gibson is a 24 year old blogger who claimed to have battled cancer through alternative medicine. She fabricated stories about how she self-treated her cancer by dieting. She also invented a Smartphone Application and wrote a book about her “healthy lifestyle”. She spread her “news” about being cured from cancer through Facebook and Instagram (on which she had 193.000 followers) where she had a huge fanbase (Ryal, 2015). Gibson became the Australians’ darling and was even voted the Elle magazine’s “most inspiring woman …show more content…
Her tweeting and posting on the Social Media channels created not just a celebrity, but an everybody’s darling type of girl, which ended up in a full sense of closeness from the audience side.
“Fraternization is the key because it denotes the impression of friendship, shared understanding, common ground and other features of reciprocity between the celebrity icon and the audience.” (Rojek, 2011, p.133)
The case of Belle Gibson is a concerning one, because we see how fast someone can make up a story and bring real people in danger just because they developed a para-social relationship with that someone. She gave her followers and cancer sufferer’s hope with her made up story. There is no ultimate number of people who were suffering from cancer and gave up conventional treatment to follow Gibson’s alternative path. But we can assume since she was hyped as a health warrior that there were a number of people doing so.
However, Horton and Whol already noted that vulnerable individuals are the most likely to get caught-up in extreme para-social relationships, Rojek (2012) describes how isolated individuals often experience the symptoms of the so called fame