Audience- 2/25

I noticed the quote, “Cross-border forms of broadcasting often now bring together audiences of people who may be geographically dispersed across great distances, to constitute diasporic communities of various sorts” in the Audience chapter of our keywords book, and I immediately thought of Selena Gomez and her instagram presence. As seen in the clips of Selena getting mobbed by fans in Paris, her fame has reached a level where she cannot even walk around in public safely. The reason why this quote relates to Selena’s fame is because her audience is so wide largely due to her instagram. I included Time Magazine’s feature on Selena being the most-followed account on all of instagram, with hundreds of millions of followers. Due to instagram, a celebrity’s fan base can grow exponentially larger and faster than it could have without the platform allowing them to share content with anyone with a smart phone or computer. In that sense, a fan doesn’t have to be able to attend a Selena Gomez concert to know what she is wearing that day, or what she is thinking, and so on. The geographical boundaries between her and her fans no longer exist thanks to instagram; fans anywhere around the globe have access to whatever content she feels like sharing. There are also many fan communities and pages on instagram, where her fans from around the world come together to talk about, praise, even worship her.