Fast marketing, furious interactions: an interstellar community on Instagram

ABSTRACT

It has been proposed that ‘the star’ is a social phenomenon, image and sign. Using this theory, I conduct a content analysis of the Instagram posts made by two stars of the Fast and Furious (2001–2017) franchise in 2017 in order to critique Dyer’s categories. This article argues that social media generates another category – the stars as interstellar community. This is demonstrated by the visible networking that adds a level of exclusivity to these stars and their lives, even as social media makes these stars appear more accessible to fans. I propose two levels of community; the interstellar community that is networking between stars to create exclusivity. The second level is a star to fan community, emphasising the star’s presence in the lives of fans. I focus on the stars’ posts that refer to the franchise itself to demonstrate how this interstellar community is conversing through Instagram in a public forum. Finally, this article considers how these posts converge with and diverge from the idea of stars as commodity, construction and ideology. This content analysis is conducted with a view to create codes and a methodology that can be applied and replicated across other social media platforms and across other stars’ social media content.

KEYWORDS:

• Fast and Furious
• social media
• Instagram

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Peter Turner

Peter Turner is a lecturer at Oxford Brookes University where he teaches on the Film, Media, and Digital Media Production courses . His monograph Found Footage Horror Films: A Cognitive Approach was published by Routledge in February 2019. He has delivered papers at the SCSMI conferences in 2015, 2017 and 2018 and is the author of a monograph on The Blair Witch Project as part of Auteur’s Devil’s Advocates series.