Culture and Fame: The Challenges of Cultural Change through Fame in the Cyberspace

By expansion of cyberspace and entering the flow of fame into the social discourse, the trend of cultural change has faced the challenge of interference of celebrities; in fact, the penetration of cyberspace among the youth and the increase in the consumption of cultural and media content by them, along with the popularity of reference groups in this space, have affected the direction and nature of the cultural change at different levels; an issue that has attracted the attention of researchers in the field of culture and media. The challenges cultural changes face are the subject of the present study. Accordingly, this study seeks to examine the challenges of cultural change through reputation in cyberspace. The research method is Husserl’s descriptive phenomenology and is based on Colaizzi's method. The participants in the study were celebrities active in various fields of art, sports, and cyberspace activists. From among them, semi-structured and in-depth interviews were conducted with 16 individuals as research samples using standard-dependent purposive sampling. Validation was confirmed by two coders, and external auditors and return to the interviewees. The results showed that the challenges of cultural change through fame in cyberspace can be classified into the capital of fame, celebritization of the society, separation of reality from representation, mediatization of culture, and new individuality. These dimensions include components such as the desire to display the ideal self, the democratization of emotions, the "patronage" policy, the tendency to consume the yellow data, cyber cultural literacy, and the acquisition of economic status through reputation.