For our group presentation we explored the topic of celebrity culture and how media visibility shapes ideas about beauty, race, and power. The goal of our presentation was to analyse how celebrities and influencers influence social norms through repeated media representation.
My main contribution to the presentation was researching the lecture material and preparing two slides of the presentation. I worked specifically on the sections about visibility in media and celebrity beauty standards. To prepare these slides, I reviewed the lecture from Week 4 and focused on the concepts of visibility, repetition, and representation discussed in the course material.
One important idea that influenced my part of the presentation was that visibility in media is not evenly distributed. As discussed in the lecture, some identities are shown more frequently in media and become seen as “normal”, while others are represented less often or framed as different. This idea helped me explain how celebrity culture contributes to shaping beauty standards. When audiences repeatedly see similar faces, bodies, and styles in media, these images begin to feel natural and expected.
Another concept that informed my slides was Stuart Hall’s idea that representation produces meaning rather than simply reflecting reality. This means that media images do not just show beauty standards; they actively help create them. In celebrity culture, the repeated circulation of celebrity images through social media, advertising, and entertainment contributes to forming widely accepted ideas about attractiveness and identity.
During the preparation process, our group collaborated by discussing how to organise the presentation and how each concept connected to the overall topic. Each member was responsible for different sections, which helped us cover multiple perspectives from the lecture material. My role was to explain how media visibility and repetition influence beauty standards in celebrity culture.
One strategy we used to engage the class was including real celebrity examples and asking the audience to think about how social media platforms shape what we see online. This helped connect the theoretical concepts from the readings to everyday media experiences.
Overall, I think the presentation worked well because we connected theoretical ideas from the lecture with real-world examples from celebrity culture. This helped make the concepts more understandable and relevant for the audience.
However, one thing that could be improved in the future is spending more time discussing how different theories connect to each other. While we explained several key concepts, we could have developed deeper analysis between them.
This experience helped me better understand how media representation works and how visibility can shape social norms and cultural expectations. In the future, this knowledge will help me analyse media more critically and understand how representation influences audiences and society.
Amaliia Markova
Amaliia blog 