[Commlist] New book: Smart Stardom: Advanced Digital Technologies and the Replication of Celebrity

Sarah Thomas is delighted to announce the publication of a new book 
together with Christopher Holliday exploring AI, digital identity, cross 
media performers and stardom.


*_Smart Stardom: Advanced Digital Technologies and the Replication of 
Celebrit_* 
<https://www.routledge.com/Smart-Stardom-Advanced-Digital-Technologies-and-the-Replication-of-Celebrity/Thomas-Holliday/p/book/9781032972886>*_y 
(Routledge)_*

*Description*
/Smart Stardom/ explores how contemporary celebrities are digitally 
replicated and re-circulated through advanced technologies, including 
artificial intelligence, computer-generated imagery, and virtual and 
augmented media. Discussing how these digital developments produce 
highly compelling virtual versions of real stars – what we term the 
“smart star” – whose digital identities remain anchored to recognisable, 
real-world figures, we explore how these virtual celebrities generate 
economic and cultural value through familiarity, affective connection, 
and nostalgia, while also embodying urgent questions about consent, 
ownership, and the control of famous faces and voices. Drawing on a wide 
range of global case studies from film, music, advertising, activism, 
and politics, /Smart Stardom/ examines how key figures are mobilised to 
help audiences engage with emerging digital environments, and how 
celebrity operates as a key point of entry into complex and often opaque 
technologies, used to authenticate new experiences while negotiating 
public anxieties around AI, data, and digital identity. Structured 
around themes of image, likeness, nostalgia, and trust, /Smart 
Stardom/ asks why celebrity remains vital to the adoption of new digital 
technologies, exploring both the agency of public figures in extending 
their identities into virtual spaces and the ways the global 
entertainment industry has expanded and exploited the appeal of licensed 
digital stardom.

_Hardback and ebook available now from Routledge's website at 
introductory reduced rates._ 
<https://www.routledge.com/Smart-Stardom-Advanced-Digital-Technologies-and-the-Replication-of-Celebrity/Thomas-Holliday/p/book/9781032972886>
*
*
*Testimonials*
"In the starry data sets, fluid bodies and celebrified production 
overflows found in the remarkable /Smart Stardom, /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 /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 "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."
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