Britney Spears and the Celebrity Confessional as Addiction

I thought you might enjoy this video post about britney spears, addiction, celebrity spectacles, dependency on the thrill, frisson of voyeuristic involvement, perez hilton, tmz.com.

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-5400077555832976669

Britney Spears, Lindsay Lohan, Courtney Love - the commodification of personal disaster is discussed from the point of view of a postmodern media confessional. This is a variant of the genre of the confession or confessional.

Susan discusses how the tabloid / media spectator confessional differs from that of, say, St. Augustine, or Rousseau, or even Thomas DeQuincey's Confessions of an English Opium Eater. The tabloid confessional creates a false catharsis within the viewer that drives a hunger for another catharsis. It engenders addiction.

We can apply the ideas of Baudrillard or Lyotard quite nicely to this; also Richard Rorty.

Your guide is Susan Smith Nash, Ph.D. (looking quite scruffy and anti-celebrity, as usual).

For more analyses of media spectacles, please visit

http://elearnqueen.blogspot.com