Twenty-first century celebrity: Fame in digital culture

Twenty-first century celebrity charts the extraordinary transformations in celebrity that have taken place since the Millennium thanks to the advent of digital culture, and particularly social media. I argue that social media have produced a radical overhaul of the celebrity-audience relationship that challenges the traditional boundary between the media and their audiences. While many aspects of the celebrity-audience hierarchy remain unchanged, the way these parties interact with one another has created a media landscape that is profoundly different to anything that has gone before. In Twenty-first century celebrity I will present the challenges of social media for established theories of celebrity, not to mention the celebrities themselves, explore the interactional dynamics of digital (social) media, and define certain types of celebrity that are unique to the digital era. Meanwhile, traditional celebrity continues to flourish, albeit in a rather more accessible and accountable form, and I explore the obligations and expectations that contemporary society demands from well-known people.