A cult of personality has traditionally been understood as the outcome of concerted actions and texts across mass media technologies, aggregated propaganda efforts and other macro communications, which work together to ascribe magnetic, reverential and idealized meanings to a single social actor among a greater population.
Absence of calls to action deprives the charismatic community of opportunities for play and participation weakening their felt sense of vergemeinschaftung, thereby eroding the cult of personality.
The closing judgement that the whole thing has become 'generic' problematizes the neoteric nature of the YouTuber cult of personality and is perhaps the most severe condemnation of YouTubers' charismatic authority.
The YouTubers authority is not 'absolute' or confined to a liminal ritual and unlike traditional cults of personality; both sides of the new cult of personality - the celebrity figure and fan - can subject each other to more or less equal demands creating a zero sum game.
In other words, while Smith accounts for a kind of introspective-performative or meta-conscious 'cult of the individual', our Weberian outlook casts attention to the wider social currents of the charismatic community that actualize this cult and receive and promote the longevity of the central personality.
Just as alternative media is challenging and transforming the ability of modern corporate media to define and control the narrative stream, the historical concept of "Cult of Personality" as a guiding principle in understanding patterns of top-down coordinated messaging concerning totalitarian society leadership is being transformed by a dynamic and "Demotic" process involving co-creation of personality cults surrounding social media "Meta-celebrities".
Although social media "Cults of personality" are quite different from those traditionally created by mass media to support totalitarian leaders, analyses of this more modern form serves as a warning to us all, for there still be manic dragons, haters, and Trolls lurking therein.
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