MAPACA

Mid-Atlantic Popular &
American Culture Association

Too often the resulting circumstances associated with negatively received celebrity social media pseudo-events are deemed a crisis when in reality they are controversies. The literature on pseudo-events as crisis gets right at the idea that not all situations are “business as usual”, and that these situations can have far-reaching impact. However, by taking the approach that these situations are indeed a crisis hinders both the theoretical understanding of the communicative environment relative to pseudo-events but also the way they are managed. Therefore, the distinction between crisis and controversy is important not just for theoretical purposes but also in the way the context is managed. The current paper will delve into how celebrity controversies are shaped with a keen eye toward understanding the best ways of managing them. More specifically, a model of strategic communication is proposed that revolves around the use of print, online and partnerships. When print, online and partnerships are taken together as a whole they provide space for a celebrity to reveal the values and assumptions about a situation, including all the issues relative to the situation. The P.O.P. model is meant to balance both the communicative and social convention aspects of controversy. In other words, the P.O.P. model is an instrumental response meant to discipline the actional and symbolic order of the controversy.