In our contemporary media landscape with its corresponding attention economy, there has been a change in classifying who should be considered a celebrity. Fueled by reality television and Web 2.0 people get control over their own media representations, whereby any ordinary person can become a ‘personality’. With the following result, a new group of ‘digital’ celebrities consisting of successful bloggers, vloggers and Instafamous personalities.

This new type of celebrity is more of a mindset about the way in which we represent ourselves on social media, a phenomenon called micro-celebrity. This has nothing to do with the number of followers, you don’t even have to be human, but it consists out of a number of star culture practices that “ordinary people” use to increase their online attention and popularity. To what extent do traditional celebrities and micro-celebrities differ and match?

This programme about stardom examines among other things notions of appearance, performance, identity, representation, intimacy, ordinariness, success, consumption and authenticity, but also about the obsession, frustration and jealousy associated with the desire to be a real star.