Smart Stardom

"In the starry data sets, fluid bodies and celebrified production overflows found in the remarkable Smart Stardom: Advanced Digital Technologies and the Replication of Celebrity, we bear witness to how contemporary stardom has been redefined by virtualisation and digitalisation. The book brilliantly explores how different digital media technologies, platforms, and the ’authentic' lived ontologies of the star, coalesce and contradict to reveal new forms of socio-cultural life. Here in these shifting virtual arenas, the echoing star offer audiences new forms of pleasure, while being contained by economic processes indebted to the regimes of neoliberal power. The book will become a landmark intervention into the way we study stars that now exist under virtual skies."

-- Sean Redmond, Professor of Cinema Studies, RMIT University, Australia

"The need for innovative analyses of digital stardom has become increasingly acute as new media technologies, often via the culture industries, have relentlessly insinuated themselves into daily life. Thank goodness for Sarah Thomas and Christopher Holliday, whose Smart Stardom: Advanced Digital Technologies and the Replication of Celebrity incisively scrutinises these new technologized formations of fame and identity as well as their sociocultural and financial logics. Tying together the on- and offscreen transformative phenomena of what they term "smart stardom," Thomas and Holliday argue persuasively for the urgency of digging deeper into—and thinking bigger about—digital personhood if we are to grasp technologized stardom's accelerating fusion of datafication, celebrification, and assetization now, and if we hope to effectively disentangle its knotty long term repercussions going forward."

-- Justin Owen Rawlins, Associate Professor, Departments of Media Studies and Film Studies, University of Tulsa, USA

"In Smart Stardom, Thomas and Holliday deftly steer a course away from alarmism about deepfakes and AI actors to survey the agency of stars as participants within a wide range of digital media technologies and experiences including video games, cinema, music video, VR, concert holographic effects, and chatbot avatars. Smart Stardom gives a persuasive account of how this is a two-way street: stars are not just digitally mediated, but they themselves act as cultural mediators for new technologies, and their real-life corporeality and consent play crucial roles in giving legitimacy and meaning to their digital likeness. For those of us wrestling with the complexities of stardom and celebrity in the era of digital replication, this expansive, clear-eyed, and illuminating book is an essential and fascinating read."

-- Lisa Bode, author of Making Believe: Screen Performance and Special Effects in Popular Cinema

"This is an incisive and far-reaching account of the centrality of the star to the current fast-evolving developments in digital media culture, and the ways they are positioned in the marketplace. Attuned both to the continuities with histories of stardom, technology, and media industries, and to the pressing questions of the present era of AI and big tech – including ethics, intellectual property, workforce issues, representation, and economics – Sarah Thomas and Christopher Holliday offer an essential, must-read intervention into the fields of star studies, digital media studies, film studies, and technology and AI studies."

-- Professor Lisa Purse, University of Reading, UK