ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on global celebrity as a problematic category. It also focuses on changes in celebrity in relation to developments in media and communications networks, especially social media. The chapter discusses the different understandings and approaches to global celebrity, a category that is all too often taken for granted and applied rather loosely and uncritically. The same goes to some extent for the notion of micro-celebrity, which is perhaps too open by including even those without an audience, although it usefully points us at celebrity as performance. In this sense, the topic of celebrity in the age of global communication networks is also closely related to the debate on the democratisation of celebrity, or at least the demotic turn. Several of the few publications that have empirically analysed global celebrity happen to concentrate on sports stars, particularly football stars. It can be relevant to investigate in what ways non-Western and local celebrity cultures have influence on other celebrity cultures.
