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weight, married poorly, or truly embarrassed themselves in public. And the “behind-the-scenes” blogs and Twitter wars, with the supposed real dirt that exposes publicists’ spin or gives a sense of being in the know, convey a sense of being able to rip open the curtains hiding the great and powerful Oz.

      Celebrities are the conduits for our dreams—if they can do it, I can do it; I want to do what they get to do. Whatever the category of celebrity, these individuals offer up visions of potential; they serve as avatars who perform our dreams, and sometimes our nightmares. They warn us of what could be if we choose the wrong path. By publicly performing their own scandals and controversies, they serve as glitzy stand-ins for everyday issues of deep concern to people, from infidelity and divorce, to financial ruin, to illness and aging, and to broader social issues, like sexism, racism, and homophobia. Celebrity culture polices the boundaries of everyday behavior: what celebrities are praised for, we should emulate; what they are reviled for, we should spurn. They may give us hope for the future, warn us of what could be if we choose the wrong path, and even make us feel thankful for the ordinariness of our own lives. “Stars matter,” as Richard Dyer writes, “because they act out aspects of life that matter to us.”11

      For these reasons, various scholars have argued that celebrities—and the industries that produce and maintain them—reinforce, or at times challenge, certain dominant cultural ideologies. Of course they embody standards of beauty, handsomeness, and an idealized body. They also help to create and sustain our dreams of upward mobility, especially in an era of increased inequality between the rich and everyone else. In this way, they can also even work to justify economic and social hierarchies. Some, like James Dean in the 1950s or Tom Cruise in the 1980s, functioned as models of male youthful rebellion or bravado, while Madonna in the 1980s and 1990s and Beyoncé in the 2010s were models of female strength, agency, and defiance of traditional constraints placed on women. In this way, celebrities and the narratives that circulate around them serve as “vessels,” which perform and, in doing so, reveal the hopes and anxieties of the cultural moment in which they exist.12

      But celebrities do not only reflect—or even come to alter—our cultural values; they also speak to our ideas about ourselves. The nature of celebrity, which claims to offer us public visions of private persons, may have a deep impact on the way in which we think and feel about our bodies, our relationships, and our very identities. Indeed, contemporary celebrity journalism obsessively tracks the personal, “private” lives of famous figures, chronicling (and critiquing) the minutiae of their lives, while inviting audiences to do the same. Twenty-first-century celebrity, therefore, combined with the explosion of social media, have been criticized for allegedly helping to foster a generation of narcissists, obsessed with publicly performing their lives (usually online) and willing to adopt for themselves the relentless judgment that accompanies such performances.13

      With these critiques in mind, it may be easy to dismiss celebrities as consumerist booby traps, meant to suck us into purchasing the latest designer bag, fad diet, or ridiculously expensive pair of jeans. Or as mere distractions, simply deflecting attention away from current events and the depressing stream of stories that dominate the evening news. Or as trivialities, social climbers grasping for Andy Warhol’s infamous fifteen minutes of fame, perhaps snagging only six or seven in today’s frantic media economy. You would not, of course, be wrong. Yet these are some of the very reasons that celebrities deserve our attention. The story of celebrity is the story of our cultural experience, particularly in our contemporary society where they dominate our popular culture. The mechanisms by which individuals become famous, the ideological visions that celebrities represent and communicate, the reasons why “ordinary” people are attracted to stars, and the influence that this cycle of production and consumption has on our culture is profound, growing, and worthy of our attention.

      That celebrity is often trivialized and marginalized in journalistic, academic, and political discourse, despite being intensely popular and generating billions of dollars, makes the study of fame all the more important. We should not be pooh-poohed into thinking that celebrity culture is merely entertainment. Because that dismissal urges us to ignore an industry that promotes certain kinds of values and attitudes, about gender, sexuality, success, class, race, relationships, and happiness, while utterly minimizing others. These values also affirm which kinds of people deserve admiration, comfort, and success and which kinds do not. In the pages that follow, we will critically examine the evolution of celebrity in an effort to develop our understanding of the relationship between famous figures, media technologies, and audiences. By attending to the history and evolution of these relationships, we can better understand the ways in which media systems and the famous figures they produce reflect our pleasures, values, and aspirations back to us in their glittering images. We can also appreciate that many aspects of celebrity culture actually have a long history, and that once electronic media technologies developed in the nineteenth century and beyond, significant precedents were set about celebrity production and consumption that are still with us today.

      Fame is not an immutable phenomenon, but rather one that has emerged, proliferated, persisted, and changed thanks to evolving technological, cultural, and ideological mechanisms. Contemporary media modalities, including the Internet and social media, mobile technologies, and an ever-growing array of digital platforms, have created a boon in the celebrity industry, spawning a vast cohort of stars and an equally impressive bevy of news programs, blogs, and magazines that endlessly clamor for new personas to attract our attention, and our dollars. With social media in particular, the barriers to becoming well known have been crumbling. So celebrity should not be seen as a static, fixed state, but an ongoing process requiring the constant renewal of media visibility; otherwise, your celebrity capital declines. After all, celebrity is a disposable commodity (the “has-been”)—in the media today, gone tomorrow. Thus, there is constant competition to stay in the media spotlight and garner that increasingly scarce and overburdened resource, audience attention. Today, with so many competing 24/7 platforms for individual promotion, with celebrity status more attainable for many yet also more fleeting, celebrity has become “status on speed.”14

      But in order to understand the explosion of twenty-first-century celebrification and the ways it functions in an urbanized, globalized, and hyperlinked culture, we need to look back, before the advent of the smartphone and Facebook, to the relationship between mass communication technologies and the evolution of celebrity in our history. Emphasizing this link, between the particular affordances of different media, both traditional and digital, and the nature and proliferation of celebrity culture, is one of our central points. As Richard Schickel argues in his study of fame, “The history of celebrity and the history of communications technology over the last century are very closely linked.”15 Yet while Schickel suggests that celebrity is a phenomenon that only truly begins in the twentieth century, we look further back in time, especially to the nineteenth century when modes of mass communication and forms of mass entertainments proliferated, in an effort to trace the production, evolution, and uses of celebrity and its effects on the everyday lives of ordinary people.

      Media technologies have, during different eras, enabled individuals to broadcast themselves—their ideas and images—to a large-scale audience. In this way, mediated representation allows the individual to become known by the many. The media, therefore, whether magazines, radio, the Internet, or Twitter, have been central to the production and maintenance of celebrity. Each media technology critically shapes and refines the way in which we come to know, perceive, and interpret the ideas and images it presents. As David Schmid writes, “The introduction of each new media technology represents a decisive shift in both the types of fame available in a culture and the ability of that culture to disseminate fame.”16 Indeed, contemporary media technologies, in which multidirectional interaction and response have supplanted the broadcast model, continue to redefine our relationship with famous figures. Because the television interview and on-camera close-ups simulate face-to-face interaction, and because interviewers have become more prying and more unctuous, audiences can establish (and imagine) a new form of intimacy with stars that did not previously exist. And now, with celebrity Facebook pages and Twitter, Instagram, and Snapchat accounts, fans can feel an even greater familiarity and intimacy with totally unknown and unknowable people. While this is a pseudointimacy, intimacy at a distance, an intimacy that is not reciprocated, there is certainly a great pleasure for fans here—they

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