Teenagers Behavior and Celebrity: The Other Side of Creative Industry in Media

Abstract

As the part of creative industry, media is the most powerful and effective way in influencing young generation. Television drama, reality show, movie, music, and social media become the part of teenager daily activities. In Indonesia, teenagers were prone to various entertainment programs from Western, Japan, and Korea. Teenagers not only admire the celebrities, but they also learn about values, lifestyle, and behaviors from media which expose the celebrities as perfect figures. Actually, achieving self-identity is the developmental task for adolescents. In this identity crisis, they need someone to be the role model in order to find out their own identity and celebrities seem to be the right role model for them. They can admire, even imitate resembling the favorite celebrity. In the positive side, this phenomenon can stimulate innovation in Indonesian creative industry by the emergence of boy-band, dance, and various franchised Western TV program. In the other side, many researchers found that this behavior can lead to poor self-esteem and lower identity achievement. This research is aimed to describe teenager behaviors in idolizing celebrity. The subjects are 16-18 years old teenagers in Surabaya. The results and suggestion will be discussed in this article.