Facebook users spend an average of 50 minutes a day on the site [1]. That is enough time to scroll through dozens of photos and status updates, maybe even read an article or two, comment on a friend’s documented travel plans, and publish a post, with time to spare if you are a seasoned user. According to Facebook, in September 2016, there were 1.18 billion daily active users on average and 1.79 billion monthly active users [2]. In short, a lot of people are using Facebook every day and for an average of just under an hour. This makes Facebook a high stakes platform. Its reach is wide and, therefore, so are its effects.

As its expanded, gaining more advertisers and publication venues, Facebook has struggled to effectively define itself—is it solely a social media platform? Is it a media company? A Pew survey revealed that 62% of US adults get news on social media. Specifically, 66% of Facebook users get news on the site. Regardless of its official designation, the platform has emerged as an interesting blessing and curse to proper media companies. It offers both a new site to reach readers and a new site of competition. Tellingly, publication sites like the New Yorker do not have readily accessible statistics about how many “users” read their content, broken down by day and month. Perhaps, this is a symptom of what headlines have been telling us for years: traditional newspapers and magazines are declining (in users, in status, in every way). Perhaps, this is a reflection of an older era of publications not retaining as strong of an interest in the trends, quantification, and click-through rate. Nevertheless, the numbers are hard to ignore.

Of course, we cannot start throwing around false equivalencies. A feature in the New Yorker is not the same as your aunt’s status update. However, with the rise of media platforms like Facebook, the status of cultural critics are arguably more precarious than ever, raising the question: In a world with headlines about the growing decline of newspapers and attention spans, could Facebook offer a way forward for cultural criticism?

“Celebrity Gossip, Academic Style” enunciates a resounding “yes.” This page posts a multidimensional cultural criticism, most prominently centered on popular culture and cultural politics. The page is “curated” (their word, not mine) by Anne Helen Petersen and Hari Raghavan. Peterson seems to take the lead, but there are still a steady stream of posts ending with Raghavan’s signature: (HR). Together, these writers craft a page that combines personal insight, news sources, and cultural criticism. They have four primary categories of posts: images (ranging from screenshots of Rudy Giuliani’s tweets to a shirtless Burt Reynolds), original criticism (Petersen is senior culture writer at Buzzfeed and Raghavan also occasionally writes longer form cultural criticism), brief criticism that accompanies an article, and articles with an excerpted quote. The page differs from the “cultural criticism” of one’s family and friends on Facebook. What sets it apart, in a word, is its curation.

In its visual culture, the page appropriates and reframes celebrity glamour. The glamour comes from the page’s profile picture and cover photo of celebrities. The black and white cover photo features a laughing Marilyn Monroe sitting next to a man looking down her dress and another unnamed attractive woman. It is nostalgia, glamour, and celebrity wrapped into one neatly cropped photo. To the left of this, the page’s profile picture features a snippet of a W magazine photoshoot with Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie, a now dated couple, casually lounging with their children. In the top right corner, below a bold yellow “EXCLUSIVE,” white serif letters spell out: “Brad & Angelina/ A 60 Page Page Portfolio by Steven Klein.” There is a sneaky meta quality to the picture. It both articulates “Celebrity Gossip, Academic Style’s” interest in “celebrity gossip,” while also quite literally framing one of the systems it takes aim at: the gossip industry.

This interest likely stems from Petersen’s academic training. Petersen received her Media Studies Ph.D. from the University of Texas. Her dissertation, titled “The Gossip Industry: Producing and Distributing Star Images, Celebrity Gossip, and Entertainment News, 1910 – 2010,” traces the “celebrified” culture borne out of the 1910s [3]. Going back to its topic of focus, in true academic form, Peterson articulates a definition of celebrity gossip in her dissertation: “Gossip, broadly defined as discourse about a public figure produced and distributed for profit, can operate within the star’s good graces or completely outside of the Hollywood machine; it can be published in “old media” print and broadcast forms or online and on a phone. Regardless of form, tone, and content, gossip remains a crucial component of the ways in which star images are produced and consumed.” [4] And, thus, the page’s name is born: “Celebrity Gossip, Academic Style.” The name succinctly articulates both the page’s subject and its approach.

And yet, scrolling through the page, this succinct focus fades. Beside Petersen’s piece about a history of shirtless male celebrities, there are posts about “Clinton’s base” and “autocracies.” Granted, the more recent posts are mostly centered around the election. Nevertheless, the page consistently engages with the politics of identity, race, gender, sexuality, and class both within and outside of the realm of celebrity gossip. These seemingly disparate posts are tied together by a central thread: critical engagement with culture. Popular culture is the most common unit of analysis, but when major events (i.e. the election, the Dakota Access Pipeline, etc.) happen, the page takes notice.

***
It is 2AM on November 9th, 2016. I am laying in bed and staring at my phone. Numbed by a mix of shock, melatonin, and technology overload, I keep scrolling and scrolling through my Facebook feed. Trying to find some semblance of grounding, I keep flipping through news articles, Facebook status updates, and now anachronistic photos from early in the day of people with Hillary Clinton cupcakes. At some point, maybe an hour later, I close my eyes and count my breaths until sleep comes.

I wake up just before my alarm at 7AM, with maybe two or possibly three hours of sleep under my belt, and decide to not look at my phone. Shortly after 10:30AM, I watch Clinton’s address. Still numb, I go back to my phone. The first post I see is from “Celebrity Gossip, Academic Style.” They have posted an article by Courtney Parker West tilted “On “Woke” White People Advertising their Shock that Racism just won a Presidency.” The article is accompanied by Raghavan’s personal explanation of what it is like to be both a queer person of color and a child of immigrants drowning in the deluge of white performances of shock.

The raw honesty of the post and the article punctuate my newsfeed. This is what “Celebrity Gossip, Academic Style” does for me most days: pushes past the noise. When I tell people about the page, they assume that it must be full of superficiality and confection. But, in fact, the page continues to be my preeminent site of cultural criticism and sometimes even news.

I follow the page because it offers several things that I do not often find in my typical news feed: (1) a way to take pop culture seriously that is written in a language that I find accessible, (2) new sources of information (who knew MTV had some really solid writing these days?), and (3) at times it pushes me to think about things differently. Not only is it a thoughtful interruption of the stream of selfies, food, and party pictures that cloud Facebook, but also a nice balance to other, more established spaces of cultural criticism.

Typically, I go to NPR, the New Yorker, and the New York Times for news and cultural criticism. “Celebrity Gossip, Academic Style” breaks away from these publications in several key ways. Most importantly, compared to the aforementioned news sites, “Celebrity Gossip, Academic Style” does not have the guise of a major publication. This allows for more personal and more honest observations. This manifests in the Facebook page’s language, which can include swearing, slang, lowercase first words, and more. The language often feels more alive and more intimate. The emotions are less filtered and the political views are clear. There is no “beating around the bush” and no time for unnecessarily abstract language. Though I have never met Petersen and Raghavan, I trust them more than most because I do not feel that I have to worry so much about possible hidden agendas or behind-the-scenes motivations.

***
The danger embedded in Facebook’s operating system, which hosts billions of users, has become headline news post-election. Buzzwords like “echo chamber” and “liberal bubble” have taken up much of the real estate of the Facebook conversation in the past few weeks. This “bubble” or “echo chamber” manifests when liberals or conservatives are only confronted by liberal or conservative opinions respectively. Facebook is a perfect breeding ground for such an echo chamber. Unless someone goes looking for contrasting opinions, most users are only exposed to the opinions of their friends, family, and trusted news sources. Often, but not always, these three opinion hubs share many of the same values and beliefs.

Inject liberal views into one such ecosystem and a liberal bubble is born. “Celebrity Gossip, Academic Style” arguably does not break free from such a liberal bubble. It often shares articles, stories, and points-of-view that are progressive. It is likely that the just-under-30,000 people who like the page are varying shades of progressive too. However, “Celebrity Gossip, Academic Style” sits closer to the edge of the liberal bubble because it often breaks free from a safe liberalism.

Let’s take a case study.

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As I mentioned, I follow the New York Times and one day I scrolled past an article titled “The End of Identity Liberalism” by Mark Lilla on my newsfeed. I did not read it and forgot about it a second later. However, on a separate trip through Facebook (yes, I am one of those 1.18 billion daily users), I saw Raghavan had re-posted the article to “Celebrity Gossip, Academic Style” with his own reflection: “Truly convinced this is the only take white male journos/critics are capable of — devaluing diversity like it wasn’t white people that ultimately failed us in this election. What a fucking joke.” What a fucking joke. It punctuated the noise of my newsfeed and the humdrum of my absentminded scrolling. So, I read the article, which articulated a loud and clear white, male, cis-gender, straight privileged point of view.

Without “Celebrity Gossip, Academic Style” and without Raghavan, I, first, would probably never have read the article and, second, if I had read the article I would not have read it as actively. I probably would have started to read it, grown tired of it and stopped. But, with Raghavan’s digital voice in my mind, I was driven to to either confirm or deny the proffered reading of the article. So I read it to the very end where Franklin Delano Roosevelt was invoked as a hero for every American across gender and race.

After reading the article, I returned to Raghavan’s post and skimmed through the comment section. One comment led me to a response by Katherine Franke, a colleague of Lilla, which not only eloquently articulated my frustrations with the Times piece, but also pushed my thinking forward. Franke writes: “Let me be blunt: this kind of liberalism is a liberalism of white supremacy. It is a liberalism that regards the efforts of people of color and women to call out forms of power that sustain white supremacy and patriarchy as a distraction. It is a liberalism that figures the lives and interests of white men as the neutral, unmarked terrain around which a politics of “common interest” can and should be built.” Franke wrote loud and clear: articles like Mark Lilla’s “The End of Identity Liberalism” are not only intellectually unsatisfactory, but also dangerous.

Thus, a mere superficial gloss of Facebook led to critical thinking. “Celebrity Gossip, Academic Style,” in a sense, called me out for having not read the article. And because I trust the page to offer relevant reading, I made the space and time to read the article critically. Then, the comment section offered a path to continue thinking about the piece. The interactive nature of the page allowed for a more, well, interactive experience.

Marshall McLuhan famously said: “The medium is the message.” As a digital platform within the world of Facebook, “Celebrity Gossip, Academic Style” relies heavily on its medium. Its casual language, consistent posts, and range of sources is supported by its casual, digital medium. As it has infiltrated billions of people’s lives, Facebook is no longer unique or special for many people, it has become both commonplace and an intimate part of daily life. Utilizing both this accessibility and intimacy, “Celebrity Gossip, Academic Style” speaks to its audience. The curators not only uses everyday language to speak clearly, but also engage with users in the comment section to foster further discussion. Within this accessible space, the page fosters critical engagement and critical thinking, something I find to be rare on Facebook.

Thus, “Celebrity Gossip, Academic Style” plays into a liberal bubble, yes, but it does so critically. The page often works as a source hub; it provides a jumping off point to visit other sites and articles. And often these articles are from liberal publications or engage with liberal points of view. The page is like my intelligent friend who keeps me more intellectually accountable, who points out things I overlook, and who filters through the mass of media to bring my attention to a collection of particularly relevant articles. The thoughtfulness of the page keeps me from becoming lost in a sea of New York Times articles, NPR podcasts, and New Yorker cartoons.

Most importantly, the page’s content makes me uncomfortable at times. For instance, it sometimes calls out a privilege I have been overlooking or it reminds me of the severity of an event. For this reason, this fostering of moments of uncomfortable confrontation, the page allows for learning and growth. I simultaneously often recognize my values in the content of “Celebrity Gossip, Academic Style,” while the page also pushes me to be honest about if I am operating in alignment with those values both off- and online. “Celebrity Gossip, Academic Style” is “edgy” cultural criticism—innovative and sharp.

***

Returning to the question of whether Facebook offers a way forward for cultural criticism, I believe that the answer is: maybe. Clearly, a page like “Celebrity Gossip, Academic Style” is working overtime towards such an aim. It is promoting more fringe criticism, circulating established cultural criticism, and creating its own. However, in many ways the page offers a specifically new way forward. It is not criticism as it has always been done. Without the guise of a major media house, “Celebrity Gossip, Academic Style” offers both quick, bite-sized cultural criticism (perfect for those who primarily engage with social media through quick scrolling) and lengthy dives into specific topics (appealing to those who use the platform to find articles). It also does not shy away from politics and the sociopolitical implications of cultural events, within and outside of the popular. For all of these reasons, in content, language, and visual style, the page feels specifically curated towards generations that have internalized the logic of social media, something that most major media houses probably pay consultants to try and recreate.

Facebook is not often the exemplar of cultural criticism, especially when that criticism comes from an out-of-touch aunt or grandparent, or a fake news source. Within a realm of superficial noise, “Celebrity Gossip, Academic Style” stands apart as an example of how to utilize Facebook’s platform towards critical ends. “Celebrity Gossip, Academic Style” does not adhere to the rules of traditional cultural criticism, and yet it does not demand that cultural criticism needs to be completely dismantled and reborn either. It offers, perhaps, a way between these two paths. It both promotes and critiques cultural criticism. In the end, it seems that “Celebrity Gossip, Academic Style” gets to have its cake and critique it too.

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