“Taylor Swift Has Arrived At Arrowhead 🔥.” “Why Fans Think Taylor Swift Made Cheeky Nod to Travis Kelce Anniversary During Eras Tour With Ed Sheeran.”
Since global superstar Taylor Swift and Kansas City Chiefs tight end Travis Kelce made their relationship public in late September 2023, their mutual support of each other has been just that: public. Whether it’s Swift attending Chiefs games or Kelce joining Swift at various stops on her sold-out Eras Tour, the social media landscape has become obsessed with what can only be described as a power couple.
As a proud Swiftie who attended the Eras Tour during Swift’s (brief) relationship with Matty Healy of The 1975, I’d be lying if I said I haven’t occasionally been sucked into the frenzy of analyzing Swift’s next move or diving into her relationship history (Bailey, 2023). After all, my TikTok feed is constantly flooded with the latest paparazzi photos of her and Kelce or complex theories hinting at the status of her relationships (Effress, 2024).
This form of celebrity journalism is nothing new. Speculation about high-profile romances goes back decades, but the obsession with Swift and her love life has reached a new level — one only made possible by social media and users’ desire to participate in this cultural discourse. It is a level of scrutiny that doesn’t always have positive implications.
As with any celebrity, Taylor Swift’s actions — even the most small and inconsequential — are often sensationalized. She releases new merchandise or drops a hint? She must be releasing new music! She posts — or doesn’t — after a tour stop on the Eras Tour? Oh, maybe she’ll announce more tour dates. Her “Midnight Rain” pose echoes one of Travis Kelce’s touchdown celebrations (Siwak, 2024)? Oh, they’re so in love. Tabloids are all over every move Swift makes — especially when they involve romance — striving to be the first to break the news to the vast audience of Swifties around the world.
Celebrity news is often “managed by those who are generating it” and “driven by the availability of images,” meaning if a photo or video of Swift and Kelce circulates widely on social media, chances are good they know about it (Turner, 2014). Even so, celebrity news and speculation is a participatory form of culture, and one that can quickly become all-encompassing and overwhelming if users on social media or “the complex array of fan sites, celebrity news sites, and official celebrity sites” online are not careful (Turner, 2014). Users often fall into the trap of thinking that if they are not involved in the speculation — whether through creating videos, engaging with users’ content, or adding to comment threads speculating about what Swift’s latest surprise song choices mean about her love life — then the discourse is incomplete.
In the age of social media, it is difficult to consider the idea of allowing celebrities to simply live their lives without reading into their every move. Swift, someone who is famous for her ability to hide “Easter eggs” in nearly every piece of content she puts on the internet, makes it easy to get sucked into connecting the dots.
When rumors of Swift and Kelce’s relationship first surfaced following his attendance at the Eras Tour in July 2023, many people were unsure if they were true (Barron, 2023). However, when news of the relationship became public, all anyone on social media could talk about was how they should have seen it coming.
Celebrities are just that: celebrities. As regular people consuming social media, it shouldn’t be our job to deduce how a celebrity’s romance came to be, no matter what type of parasocial relationship we feel we have with them or how happy we are to see them thriving.
The rise of the internet and the transition into the Web 2.0 and 3.0 eras have contributed to this fanaticism. While previous periods of tabloid journalism featured “highly curated content with a focus on lifestyles of the rich and famous,” today’s celebrity news and technology’s contributions allow ordinary users to “play the roles of armchair experts, investigative reporters, digital paparazzi, talking heads and celebrities themselves” (Drenton, 2022). Eventually, a rough literacy of celebrity news became part of “what is expected from a ‘digitally literate’ netizen,” proving how the integration of social media makes celebrity news a much more participatory form of culture that users find themselves sucked into whether they want to be or not (Shifman, 2013).
Between social media, the Eras Tour, and Taylor Swift’s general societal dominance, anyone calling themselves a Swiftie is expected to have a rough knowledge of her romantic history. Best known are the lovers and exes who have whole albums or, sometimes, ten-minute songs based on them — I’m looking at you, Jake Gyllenhaal.
But there comes a point when this broad knowledge or casual vested interest in Swift’s romantic endeavors becomes overwhelming. Although platforms like TikTok allow for “an entertaining live action, participatory role-play version of TMZ playing out in real time,” there can be a “dark side” to this type of participatory culture that focuses so closely on one person’s life that everything else fades away (Drenton, 2022). Since 2017, when Swift wiped her social media pages before entering her “Reputation” era, her Instagram feed has focused much more narrowly on her music, her tours, and her friends than on her personal life (Heller, 2017).
Ultimately, celebrities — even Taylor Swift — are just like us: read too much into their personal lives and and they’ll disappear.
Works Cited
Bailey, A. (2024, October 25). Taylor Swift and Matty Healy's Full Relationship Timeline. ELLE. Retrieved November 20, 2024, from https://www.elle.com/culture/celebrities/a43874381/taylor-swift-matty-healy-relationship-timeline/
Barron, T. (2023, July 26). 'I took it personal': Disappointed Travis Kelce couldn't give bracelet to Taylor Swift. ESPN. Retrieved November 20, 2024, from https://www.espn.com/nfl/story/_/id/38075344/kansas-city-chiefs-travis-kelce-taylor-swift-eras-tour-number-bracelet
Degrazia, L. (2024, August 15). Why Fans Think Taylor Swift Made Cheeky Nod to Travis Kelce Anniversary During Eras Tour With Ed Sheeran - E! Online. E! News. Retrieved November 20, 2024, from https://www.eonline.com/news/1406192/why-fans-think-taylor-swift-made-cheeky-nod-to-travis-kelce-anniversary-during-eras-tour-with-ed-sheeran
Drenton, J. (2022). West Elm Caleb and the rise of the TikTok tabloid. The Conversation
Effress, S. (2024, September 30). Did Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce break up? Explaining the simple reason for singer's absence from Chiefs games. Sporting News. Retrieved November 20, 2024, from https://www.sportingnews.com/us/nfl/news/taylor-swift-travis-kelce-break-chiefs-games/e20afbfd15a7de1763dd073c
Heller, C. (2017, May 4). Taylor Swift Returns to Instagram After 2 Months But Remains MIA in Real Life: What's She Been Up To? - E! Online. E! News. Retrieved November 20, 2024, from https://www.eonline.com/news/848495/taylor-swift-returns-to-instagram-after-2-months-but-remains-mia-in-real-life-what-s-she-been-up-to
Shifman, L. (2014). Memes in digital culture. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Chapter 3.
Siwak, M. (2024, July 6). Taylor Swift Copies Travis Kelce's Touchdown Dance at Amsterdam Show. Us Weekly. Retrieved November 20, 2024, from https://www.usmagazine.com/entertainment/news/fans-are-convinced-taylor-swift-added-travis-kelce-touchdown-dance-to-midnight-rain-in-amsterdam/
Taylor Swift Has Arrived At Arrowhead 🔥 | Taylor Swift is in the building at Arrowhead Stadium to support her boyfriend Travis Kelce's Kansas City Chiefs against the Baltimore Ravens 🏈 (🎥:... | By DraftKings. (2024, September 5). Facebook. Retrieved November 20, 2024, from https://www.facebook.com/draftkings/videos/taylor-swift-has-arrived-at-arrowhead-/8192362037551807/
Turner, G. (2014). Is celebrity news, news? Journalism, 15(2), 144–152.
Understanding Taylor Swift's impact through her representation of participatory celebrity culture demonstrates ideas similar to Laurie Penny's Wired article, "We Can Be Heroes: How the Nerds Are Reinventing Pop Culture." Penny explores fandom and how technology created an explosion of mass fan culture. With this cultural shift, barriers between creators and their fans began to break down, allowing closer interactions. This idea is evident in your explanation of Swift's use of "Easter eggs" in her internet content, supplying fans with little teasers of her next move. The discourse surrounding Taylor Swift reveals excitement about these easter eggs; speculations about what they mean have become a significant part of fan culture. As fans post online, communicating their support of this aspect of Swift's platform, they use modern technology to engage with their fandoms in ways that were never possible. Swift sees this support and continues to share more easter eggs, providing what she knows the fans want to see. Additionally, Penny demonstrates how, with digital technology, there are now more choices of what to watch and interact with. Due to this, fans have found more niche communities to connect over their specific ideas. Your piece discusses many elements within Taylor Swift's career: her famous Eras Tour, her relationship with Travis Kelce, and her social media transformation during her "Reputation era." Digital technology has expanded the medium to which users can interact with these individual ideas, now providing smaller spaces for fans to share their specific excitements, which Penny explains brings people together. Taylor Swift's highly versatile career gives fans many opportunities to find something that particularly fascinates them within her broader stardom, and with the rise in digital media, niche online communities allow individuals to build connections based on their distinctive shared interests.
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