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