On the Cultural Significance of Sham El- Nassim

Yesterday we had an unusual banquet at our house, one that particularly smelled horrible! Yes I did say this. It was a celebration for the ancient dating feast of “Sham El Nassim”. While most Egyptians today think Sham El Nassim is an Arabic word (شم النسيم) meaning the “the smell of the Zephyr” because it is celebrated during the spring time, the word was found to be more ancient than one could think of. This feast of Sham El Nassim has ancient Egyptian origins with the word "Shemu" being used in the ancient Egyptian culture during harvest days meaning “the day of creation”. Greek historians of the first century have recorded accounts of ancient Egyptians eating salted fish, lettuce and onions. That’s what I meant by the horrible smell! Egyptians were thought to celebrate the Shemu since 2700 B.C. and surprisingly it is still celebrated to that day with minor changes.

Later on, Coptic Christians in the second century A.D. found that the feast came during the Christian Lent and were not able to celebrate and eat the salted fish during that time, so they moved the feast to the following day of the Easter. The day of Sham El Nassim has to occur on Monday, since Easter has to be on Sunday. It’s also interesting to mention that the ancient Egyptian word “Shemu” developed to the Coptic word “Shom Ennisim” then finally to the Arabic transliteration “Sham El Nassim”.

While this blog post was not intended to be a historical class, it was important to give a brief background to understand the culture behind what we just celebrated yesterday.

You are probably wondering how the feast is supposed to be on Monday while we celebrated yesterday on Friday. Indeed “Sham El Nassim” is celebrated on Monday following the Eastern calendar of Easter which was meant to be on Monday May 6 this year. However, due to some family circumstances and traveling the feast was postponed a little bit.

Let’s just get to the sociology of this ancient feast!

According to the functionalist approach, Sham El Nassim can be seen as an event with its own rituals and practices that brings people together in social solidarity. Sham El Nassim, as a collective celebration, that makes all Egyptians, regardless of their religion; join together to celebrate in the same way. Also, what is more fascinating is Egyptians in Qatar who unite in family groups to celebrate this event. To us, Egyptians, the culture of Sham El Nassim meets the four characteristics of popular culture: being well liked by everyone, is easily recognized by all Egyptians, all classes in Egypt understand the rituals associated with the feast and finally everyone can relate to it in different ways.

The main practice in Sham El Nassim is family gathering either in public parks or in houses. Yesterday, over seven families came and joined our feast at our house. None of these families are direct relatives of ourselves, but they are friends who we relate to when living abroad. Such a family gathering makes us all appreciate the unity it generates and the sense of togetherness.

The main ritual of Sham El Nassim is to eat “Fisikh”, which is an Egyptian dish of salted fish, and onions, as you can see in the images below. However, yesterday I noticed that the table of fisikh was 80% women with only two or three men only eating fisikh. Those who found fisikh distasteful, like me, were mostly men who had another table with other types of food like pastas, kofta and salads.

Even though everyone who attended enjoyed the family gathering on Sham El Nassim, not everyone enjoyed the rituals of eating fisikh. Therefore, I do wonder with Grazian in his book “mix it up” if such a ritual will continue to be passed through the main agents of socialization. And even if it did will it still generate the same sense of social solidarity and unity amongst the celebrating community?

I also noticed the segregation that Fisikh has made, most women sat on the Fisikh table and most men and children sat on the normal food table. It could be because of health or dietary choices, especially because Fisikh has direct correlation to high blood pressure, dehydration and occasionally food poisoning if not cleaned well. But this phenomena of less than 50% eating Fisikh could be also because of the other options that were available that included Italian pasta. Hence, globalization can be a factor that interferes with cultural elements of Sham El Nassim.

Will the feast that survived more than 4700 years be able to survive the 21st century? While, globalization might seem to be destroying the rituals of eating Fisikh on Sham El Nassim, it has given me an escape from eating it so maybe having more options can be good! Yet fisikh lovers like my mother will still love Fisikh anyways.

Feminism phobia

It seems that most of my generation is torn between what feminism is and what people perceive it to be. “There is a very warped view of feminism because the movement has been hijacked by radical activists who soak up all the media attention. They damage feminism the same way that the Westboro Baptist Church hurts Christianity, or Islamic extremists damage the reputation of Islam. Understand that, though there are lots of horrid, hateful women that call themselves soldiers of feminism, the core of the movement is not what they say it is, and will never be” said one of my male friends while expressing his opinion about feminism.

Feminism has been portrayed in movies through the representation of powerful, smart women who are capable of defeating “evil” male figures. This representation made me assume for a long time that feminism truly stands for strong, independent women. The female characters in these movies could be described by two definitions: The Bond girl or the Single girl. According to Hilary Radner in her book Neo-Feminist Cinema, “The Bond Girl represents a change in the women’s position…the single girl, unlike the Bond girl, was not by nature exceptional. Rather, she was an ordinary girl who strove successfully to become exceptional.” Although problematic to some extent, those representations of women in movies reflect a side of feminism that does not seem to form a big problem considering that it is breaking gender stereotypes. So what is the problem with feminism?

In my opinion the problem stimulated from the fact that feminism now encourages the notion of gaining power through appearance and consumption. This is what Radner defined in her book as neo-feminism. According to Radner, “Neo-feminism refers to the tendency in feminine culture to evoke choice and the development of individual agency as the defining tenets of feminine identity.” An example of such form of feminism is presented in movies such as Sex and the City 2. The representation of women in such movies emphasize the importance of their appearance and the power they have through making the right decision in purchasing products (mostly fashion brands). If feminism was only concerned with empowering women and achieving equality, then why is popular culture using feminist movements to advocate for passivity through product consumption?

What we're left with are two forms of feminism: The tomboyish representation of women that is defined as the Bond girl or Single girl, and the autonomous female that has control over her appearance and is defined by the neo-feminism movement. The question is, does either of them represent what feminism really stands for?

What on earth is a Harlem Shake?

This is a question that has appeared on my Twitter and Facebook timeline more than 10 times by different people throughout the past two weeks. “It’s the new Gangam Style!” said one of my friends.

These days, it’s hard to predict what will be a “hit” and what will be a “miss.” According to David Grazian in his book Mix It Up (2010), “The convergence of media content across platforms promises the development of exciting and dynamic new forms of cultural production.” Since achieving success in today’s mass media market is unpredictable, media industries base their decision making on strategies to minimize risk and financial loss. However, famous artists and prominent production labels are now faced with the problem that consumers themselves participate in the coproduction of their own media experience.

Although the strategies used by media firms to minimize risk were shown to be successful in many cases, today’s generation of consumers form a threat to those strategies considering that today’s consumers are also co-producers of pop-culture. According to Grazina (2010), “It is exceedingly uncommon for the media industries to promote cultural products that do not cleave to common types of genre conventions or stylistic boundaries.” However, if we observe the popularity of the Harlem Shake from a sociological perspective, it’s noticeable that it stimulates from the fact that it’s easily reproduced among ordinary consumers. Therefore, the success of a cultural product these days doesn’t necessary depend on the distribution or strategies held by prominent media corporations, instead, it’s now determined by the active participation of the audience in co-producing their own pop-culture and the widespread of popular fades among regular consumers.

The Internet meme culture has gained attention over the past couple of years and the Harlem Shake is considered a subset of this Internet meme culture. Although unexpected, the popularity achieved by the Harlem Shake has caused it to become one of the most popular trends of the year. However, Internet memes could also be considered a strategy for risk reduction since it has been used as a marketing technique and it has proven to be effective in achieving marketable success. Following this popular trend, on February 21^st Northwestern University in Qatar participated in the Harlem Shake trend.

I Fell in Their Trap, Did You?

Last week, we learned about the culture industry from the critical theorists’, Adorno and Horkheimer’s, perspectives. As professor Geoff Harkness explained to us in class, “popular culture is propaganda for corporations, designed to increase their economic power and social dominance.” Basically, we as consumers are soft targets for the big corporations since they produce shows, TV programs, films or design products to entertain us, and to keep us distracted from the fact that we are overworked and exploited customers. For example, fast food tastes great but it doesn’t mean that it’s healthy, and in reality it’s destroying our bodies in the long run as we keep having more cheeseburger meals. Therefore, the popular culture is a problem because it happens to be a form of social control that turns people into mindless consumers. While learning about risk management last week, the Pretty Little Liars show popped into my head as I’m currently watching it. The show is based on a series of books that were written by the American author Sara Shepard. So what ended up happening was that the book got to be made into a TV series. The story got to be developed by a prominent writer with a record of success, Marlene King who also wrote the story for the movie Just My Luck. The producers didn’t pretty much go with the plot of the story and did change A, who happens to be the anonymous person that the four friends kept getting texts from throughout the show. This was done due to the reason below that was explained by the producer of the show, Lisa Cochran-Neilan: "If you go just by the books, your fans are gone. We've used them as source material, we've used them for backbone, but obviously, if you only went by the books, your audience knew before you started shooting what the story was.” This is exactly how they hooked their audiences up with the TV show by simply not following the story of the book as they want to attract their audience and to keep them so attached to the show as they continue to anticipate what’s going to happen next. Another point is that ABC Family is the main channel that hosts Pretty Little Liars. They are also playing other TV shows like The Secret of the American Teenager, Gilmore Girls, 10 Things I Hate About You, and other shows won’t has a good number of fans. So, they are not really afraid of losing because they know they already have big hits. In addition, Pretty Little Liars is on iTunes and Apple TV for people to either buy the whole season or purchase by episode. Another opportunity to make money was by using the name of the show for merchandising through using the name of the characters in the show and putting them on hoodies, T-shirts, iPhone covers, bags, … etc. I fell in their trap because I keep buying more episodes so I can identify who A is. But, the producers are expanding the show and keep adding other additional seasons. Not sure if I'll ever know who A is!

Your Typical Mix of Romance, Tragedy & Subculture

On Wednesday 3rd of October I attended a play held in Katara titled Romeo and Juliet in Baghdad. The play was heavily glocalized in terms of production design and content .The script was tweaked to be made applicable to the events which occurred/are occurring in Iraq. Globalization can be seen by the fact that the Iraqi Theater Company is touring to certain countries to showcase their adaptation of the famous Shakespearean play.

To be honest I was quite hesitant to attend. Being a huge Shakespeare fan, I automatically thought that it would be extremely unoriginal since ‘Romeo and Juliet’ is a play that has been taken on heavily. However, I was pleasantly surprised to how original and glocalized the play was. Also, the production was extremely beautiful and simple. The mood of the scenes was incorporated in the lighting and sound used. The sound was somewhat manipulated to act as a constant reminder to the war and tension in Iraq.

My friends and I are really into plays and have very similar tastes in terms or music and television shows. I guess we internalized the same cultural attitude. There’s a sense of reassurance one gets when having similar social interactions with a group of individuals. Interestingly enough I heard about the play from a person who isn’t part of my close social network. Even though the person was a weak tie, in a social network sense, he virtually introduced me to the play by posting the link on Facebook. Having diversity in a social network proves to be beneficial in terms of accessing knowledge. By posting the link on Facebook he passively influenced his Facebook friends to know attend or at least know that this event is taking place in Doha.

During class a metaphor was used to describe identity and the ways in which we perform in our everyday life. The metaphor suggests that social roles are like dramatic performances “enacted” on a public stage. While watching the play I couldn’t help but think of the metaphor and how it applies to the different roles we play in different situations. My student self is completely different to my role as a daughter. In our roles we act depending on whom we’re interacting with and what is expected of us. The actors in the play were doing so in trying to communicate a certain message about the destruction of war and the destructive tension between different religions.

Also, the subcultures within the play could be applied to our everyday life. The mujahedeen and the musicians stood out as subcultures. In the play the mujahedeen took part in destruction, which essentially led to the death of the two main characters. The intensity of the subculture was evident by the fact that the character had no problem getting himself killed in the name of what he and his subculture believes in. The musicians on the side of the stage were not part of the play yet they provided an interesting soundtrack.

The evening spent made me realize the ways in which pop culture is diffused and the power of interpersonal word-of-mouth communication.

Sports Subculture at NUQ

In my freshman year, I founded Northwestern University in Qatar’s first sports team, the Men’s Football team. Back then I didn’t know I was bringing a subculture into the NUQ community. I just thought of it as a club like all the other ones that existed. However, after September 30, 2012, after a sociology class about subcultures, I realized that I should be going down in the history books as one of the first students to introduce the subculture of sports in NUQ. The girl’s basketball team, however, will be recorded as the first successful NUQ sports team. It was much more challenging for me because NUQ had plenty of girls, but very few male students.

So how is the football team a subculture? A subculture is basically a group of people within a broader or larger culture. What differentiate them are their beliefs and values, which may or may not overlap with the beliefs and values of the popular culture. In this case, I would like to refer to NUQ as the popular culture and the football team as its subculture.

The major goal of NUQ is to provide excellent education and produce individuals who will become the pioneers of the media industry in this region. The major goal of the football team, however, is to promote physical education, sportsmanship and win competitions. We see some differences in the goals and beliefs of both, but there are also some overlaps. Honesty, discipline, punctuality are values that are required by the members of both organizations.

Through the football games organized in Education City, I also observed the emergence of fandom subculture. Several people come to support their teams during tournaments and important games. The sports subculture is closely tied to the fandom subculture. Members of the sport subculture are mostly athletes and other active members in the field of sports, whereas, the fandom subculture consists of individuals who admire or are passionate about a specific sport or any activity.

Ageism in the media

You need look no further than in the fashion and lifestyle magazines and on the TV to see that people of a certain age, especially women, are seriously under-represented. Ageism is showing itself in all of areas of global culture from films, music, advertising, fashion and even in the news. There is no denying that popular culture is rooted in youth and energy and that is reflected in all our media.

Alarmingly, advertising and films tend to promote images of older persons in a negative light – as helpless, bumbling, and forgetful – in a stereotype described jokingly as “senior moments”.

Many Hollywood actresses have drawn attention to the fact that once they have past 40, there are less and less roles for them in movies. Female newsreaders will more often than not be “put out to pasture” as they get older and begin to show signs of aging while their male counterparts continue in the industry despite greying hair and facial lines.

As a result of this, women have been pushed to resort to face and body enhancements to accommodate the relentless demand for all things young and youthful. The extent of this demand has resulted in girls as young as 12 and 13 advertising beauty, perfume and fashion products as representative of the “ideal woman” and one women “would most like to look like”. The media has continued to be a willing participant promoting these impossible ideals.

The popular Culture in Clueless the Movie

When we feel impotent and out of control, and feel we are in need for a sanctuary in a place where we could gather our thoughts and regain our strength, where would we go? Well, according to Cher, we should go to the mall!  

 

Clueless is a comedy film directed by Amy Heckerling that was produced in 1995. The story is based on Jane Austin’s novel “Emma”; however, the setting is different, where the story takes place in Beverly Hills in the 1990s.

The film portrays the material and non-material culture of Beverly Hills’ high school kids, with all their values, beliefs, and norms.  Cher, the main character in the film, is a rich teenager, whose mother died long time ago while undergoing liposuction. She is obsessed with fashion, shopping, and matchmaking; yet, she is not interested in dating high school boys. Her ex stepbrother Josh is a college student, who keeps teasing Cher for being selfish and superficial, and tells her that her only direction in life is ‘toward the mall’. 

The film portrays the popular culture in Beverly Hills using sarcasm. Most of the people are materialistic, obsessed with fashion, dating, and plastic surgery. For example, a lot of high school girls had a bandage on their noses, and some on their chins, which mocks the fact that plastic surgery, and especially having a nose job, is a norm in this society. Moreover, one of the girls, trying to avoid tennis practice in school, tells the teacher that her plastic surgeon doesn’t want her to do any activity where balls fly at her nose. Another thing that contributes to this irony is the death of Cher’s mom while undergoing a liposuction surgery. The obsession with fashion is also exaggerated and observed when Cher designs her clothes in the morning on a computer screen rather than on her own body.

     This is the common culture in Beverly Hills, or the large subculture of the rich. People are expected to be fashionable, and this is shown when the new girl arrived to the school looking like a farmer, as one of the girls said. However, Cher and her friend Donnie decided to use their popularity for a good cause and start their “project” to give the poor girl a new look, so she would be able to fit in their society. Moreover, The girls have their own female language including terms that substitutes for things like period and sex. 

The film portrays the materialistic life people in Beverly Hills live. They understand the language of brands, the shopping mall is considered to be a place where Cher can concentrate, think and get focused. As Josh, Cher’s ex-stepbrother, says, Cher’s ‘only direction in life’ is ‘towards the mall’.  According to Coonie, ‘Cher’s main thrill in life’ is to give someone a makeover, ‘it gives her a sense of control in a world full of chaos.’   

The popular cultural represented in the film was shown to an extreme level of exaggeration and irony, however 16 years after the film release this popular cultural, based on materialism and consumerism, is now found not only in the US but also worldwide.

                          

The Twitter Sensation

Twitter is what some may call a global media phenomenon. It is in fact a global sensation, that started out not too long ago. But how come millions of people know about it? How did the website spread globally?

It spread through word of mouth communication. People who have accounts, or who heard about the website, told their friends about it and their friends told their friends. The cycle continues. Word of mouth communication is only made stronger by another global sensation - the Internet. Through the Internet and social networking websites such as myspace, facebook and now twitter there is instant communication between people who might not be in the same room, country or even continent. All one has to do is write on their friends’ “walls” and if those friends are at that very moment on the Internet, they will get the message. Also, Instant Messaging is very popular and it increases word of mouth communication exponentially. So ideas spread much faster now then they ever used to in the past.

People were talking about the new social networking website (Twitter) for a long duration of time and with great intensity and enthusiasm. Due to the global recognition of this website, there is now a collective consumption of this kind of popular culture. Virtual local scenes are emerging on Twitter through Twitter’s use of hash-tags and lists that people are allowed to make. People of the same subculture who do not live in the same place are constantly, in a way, in the same place because of Twitter. There are many downloadable applications that allow Twitter to be on one’s mobile phone, iPad or laptop. So people are constantly communicating with one another.

Source

As seen, Twitter can be studied sociologically. The concept of Twitter fits in perfectly with the interaction approach of popular culture. This approach focuses on the smaller and informal processes of communication such as word of mouth. This approach depends on interactions between small groups of people and the influences they have through those small actions and does not depend on big-budget marketing. This is exactly what Twitter does. One way it does this is by the trending topics one sees on the side bar. A concept or idea that started out between a couple of people somehow spreads around a region or the world and gains global recognition.

Source

You call that a handshake?

Through many years the most known gesture was a handshake. It expressed respect and friendliness to the other person. Today, people managed to develop their gesture which mainly presented their cultural identity and individualism.

The functionalist theory suggests that symbols and practices surrounding popular culture brings people together by generating a shared sense of social solidarity. So, today, the way you greet someone expresses the society and culture you come from. In-fact, it could represent the subculture you belong to. For example, hip hop fans have certain gestures they understand and interpret in their own way. While on the other hand, Kings and Queens have very different gestures that expresses their belonging to a royal family.

 

But today, a gesture doesn’t only represent your society or culture it symbolizes individualism. People now greet each other with different gestures than the culture or society they belong to and no longer need to commit to their society’s gesture. For example, in many of the gulf regions men greet each other by nose. However, this gesture is not preformed by every member of the society, some people prefer to greet each other with a high five or just a hand wave! 

 

 

A hand shake is no longer the ultimate gesture and the most recognizable one.  Many high school and college students have created their own unique gesture to greet each other and most of them agreed that a handshake expresses formality. So, greeting someone with a handshake is now conceded a professional gesture used for strangers and older people!

 

While observing my friends way of greeting each other, I’ve noticed that each person greets in his own way. In the Arab regions, there is the confusion of kisses. In the gulf region girls greet each other with three kisses on one cheek while in other countries girls greet each other with one kiss on each cheek. Also, in most of the Arab countries, men don’t greet women which sometimes could lead to an embarrassment to both sides.

Use your finger to stir my tea, and for dessert I’ll suck your teeth.
Be too sweet and you’ll be a goner, yup, I’ll pull a Jeffery Dahmer.
Listen to the track on the official Kesha channel on youtube.



Those were words from the second verse of Ke$ha’s Cannibal from the Extended Play of the same name. Of course, after hearing the disturbing lyrics, ignoring the catchy beat, I decided to simply search this unfamiliar name. Of course, I understood the rest of the lyrics; she wants to eat boys for breakfast and lunch and she’s proud of calling herself a cannibal that she shouts "I am cannibal." That at first didn’t disturb me as much. On the contrary, I thought it was creative for the EP to be called Cannibal since it’s kind of a step higher in her diet from her debut album Animal, but that’s not the point. The point is that she used the name in her song and I simply had to Google it; Jeffery Dahmer.

It turns out that Jeffery Dahmer was a real cannibal, before he was ironically murdered in jail the same way her killed his fist victim. Enjoying his secret activity as a cannibal and a necrophiliac (someone who satisfies his pleasures over corps and dead bodies) and especially bodies he kills himself. With more research, I found out that there’s an influence from the surrounding society to this created monster. He grew up in this environment where he picked up the habit of dissecting dead animals when he’s young, and it’s only natural that he’d want to progress to something bigger as he grows old; something bigger here being the human bodies.



Now, I’m seeing that pop music is spreading things I didn’t know because with it I learned more about the cannibal culture, as an example. There are different movies and books which are inspired by real life societies and culture of cannibals. The scariest productions of all are TV documentaries about the real cannibals. There’s obviously a real social aspect and a taboo that can’t be denied, or where would those songs, movies and books have their inspiration from? And I guess the way pop culture deals with this horrifying act is by making it part of it. In Ke$ha’s case, she made this image of cannibalism somewhat acceptable. When something becomes part of the pop culture, even out of another culture, it seems familiar and therefore we’re not afraid of it anymore. Why? Because it connects to us and becomes popular within us as well. I’m not trying to say we’ll grow to be cannibals, but we won’t fear it until we witness it.

Read this blog post to see the association of pop culture and societies acceptance of taboos.

A Popular Culture within a Popular Culture

It is clearly obvious how music is becoming an essential tool in film production and in determining how appealing a movie would be for its audience in the last couple of decades. However, this doesn't mean that movies that play music in them are definitely successful, nor the movies that you barely hear music playing in them are extreme failures.

Lots of songs became famous simply because they were played in big movies. And again, not all songs in movies achieved such success, in which the ones that would achieve it were mainly theme songs of movies, or the song’s artist is someone who’s already famous in the music industry. For instance, all of us know how “My Heart Will Go On” by Celine Dion became a huge romance hit once it was played in the movie Titanic. Till this day we listen to this song playing in retail spaces, especially the numerous instrumental versions of it in fancy restaurants.

[Above: the theatrical poster of the movie "Titanic"]

Apart from how movies can bring songs or artists to fame, the opposite process is not different. A song or an artist can bring a particular movie or a TV show into fame as well. Most of these motion pictures feature famous singers or famous bands having short scenes in movies in which they just appear in to sing. And if course, when fans know that their favorite artist/artists are featuring in a particular movie, they definitely watch the movie to anticipate the part in which their idol/ idols going to perform in. A lot of examples I can give to elaborate this practice. The movie “New York Minute”—starring Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen—featured the famous pop punk band Simple Plan performing an amazing song that didn’t feature in any of their albums till this day. The song is called “Vacation” and people can have it only if they would buy the soundtrack of the motion picture.

[Above: the Olsen twins and Simple Plan]

Another movie was “Hannah Montana: The Movie.” Although it was meant to be for kids, a lot of adults watched it along with their children because it features a young talented country singer that people are obsessed with: Taylor Swift. She is that singer who brought life to country music again and made it popular among young people too. She was featured in the movie singing a hit that isn't in any of her albums till this day as well. The song is called “Crazier.”

Below is a video I made that shows how second-marketing plays a big role in the popularity of some movies:

Click Here to Watch the video on YouTube

What does this tell us? It tells us that media companies often refer to secondary markets (in this case, being music and famous artists) to minimize the risks of grabbing audience toward their productions. To conclude, popular cultures often rely on one another to achieve success and obtain the validity and vitality of their productions.

Reading books: is it still a popular cultural activity?

Considering the fact that the interests of a person may differ from another person, some people enjoy watching movies and/or listening to music regularly, while some people enjoy reading books to enjoy and fulfill their free-time.

Although reading may be considered as an old-fashioned habit to many people (especially to youth) in this century, it’s still enjoyed and practiced by other people. But how do we know that reading is still considered as a popular cultural activity when knowing that the rate of “reading a book” in the world is decreasing massively over time? Let’s elaborate this by supporting it with real-life examples.

The first shining example is Oprah’s Book Club. But first of all, let me define what a book club is in my own words. A book club is an ongoing group activity that involves individuals of similar book choices together to read certain books, discuss them, share emotions and opinions, etc. Going back to Oprah’s Book Club example, who of us would usually read anything about any product—or even buy it—just because a well-known TV personality had once recommended it? Almost every fan of this personality does so. But how did all this happen? Let’s refer to Oprah’s Book Club example again. Oprah has always been entertaining us and attracting us with the variety of topics and stories she presents in her show. She interviews celebrities, talented kids, people with emotional stories of crime or suffering, etc. She made the public more attached to these kinds of stories. The result? The more fanbase she would have. This amazing love that she gains makes it easier for her to say or promote stuff for people to attach to or to do. Furthermore, by forming her own book club and recommending books, Oprah makes more and more people open books and actually read.

The second example is the clever idea of making movie sequels based on books. How is that clever? Almost everyone has watched and loved the first Harry Potter movie before reading the book. What was J.K Rowling’s next step? Her next step was writing the next books of the sequel before making the movies based on them. As some people got attached strongly to Harry Potter stories, of course they couldn’t wait for the next movies to come out to know the rest of the story. As a result, they had only one option: to buy and read the rest of Harry Potter novels to know how the story will come to at the end.