ABSTRACT
In a world marked by ever-deepening economic and environmental uncertainty, where traditional jobs are disappearing and capitalism is in perpetual crisis, achieving celebrity status has come to seem as reasonable a life goal as any other. These days, money and power follow iconic visibility and everyone wants to get in on the act. While Snooki and The Situation of MTV’s Jersey Shore have taken getting paid for “being themselves” to lucrative new heights, universities offer seminars for students on how to successfully self-brand for the job market. A recent study conducted by the Children’s Digital Media Center at the University of Southern California found that fame was not only the value most propagated in current mainstream children’s television, but “had become the number one aspirational value” across the American tween population in general (Uhis and Greenfield 2011). Online, a “Google number” or “Klout score” offers to measure the power of an individual’s reputation, while other services compete to protect, or obliterate, corporate or individual brands for a fee. In this context, personal disclosure and surveillance have become “chic” (Andrejevic 2004: 200) and, for some, developing a reputation for having a reputation has become a full-time job. But this obsession with celebrity and self-branding did not come out of nowhere; the practices of self-promotion found in the Facebook profile, the YouTube channel, or the reality television participant have historical antecedents whose contours can tell us much about processes of capitalist accumulation, and the shifting relationship between subjectivity and economic value in the contemporary moment.
