The IT Girl (ITG) is a play, devised by Central Coast theatre company DevisingTheatre, exploring the interrelated concepts of Google identity and celebrity. Here, I shall consider Google identity and celebrity as contemporary mechanisms of subjection. Examining ITG in relation to other theatrical works presenting media technologies as formative of our subjectivity, I shall draw on Haraway’s (19...

Contagion is a form of magical thinking in which people believe that a person's immaterial qualities or essence can be transferred to an object through physical contact. Here we investigate how a belief in contagion influences the sale of celebrity memorabilia. Using data from three high-profile estate auctions, we find that people's expectations about the amount of physical contact between the...

BACKGROUND Celebrity diagnoses can have important effects on public behaviour. UK television celebrity Jade Goody died from cervical cancer in 2009. We investigated the impact of her illness on media coverage of cervical cancer prevention, health information seeking behaviour and cervical screening coverage. METHODS National UK newspaper articles containing the words 'Jade Goody' and 'cancer'...

BACKGROUND The impact of media reporting of suicides of entertainment celebrities may affect suicide rates due to an imitation effect. We investigated the impact on suicides of the media reporting of the suicide of a male television celebrity. METHODS All suicides during 2003-2005 in Taiwan (n = 10,945) were included in this study. A Poisson time series autoregression analysis was conducted t...

With rising public awareness of climate change, celebrities have become an increasingly important community of non nation-state ‘actors’ influencing discourse and action, thereby comprising an emergent climate science–policy–celebrity complex. Some feel that these amplified and prominent voices contribute to greater public understanding of climate change science, as well as potentially catalyze...

When Congress created the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (“HIPAA”) in 1996, the intention was to create, for the first time, a comprehensive, uniform, patient protection process. The legislation was given teeth – up to $100 for each violation (which can total hundreds of violations for one investigation), and up to $25,000 per person in a calendar year. Many feared the HIPA...