The Specular Economy

Abstract

There is an expansion of celebrity culture outward. Through new media forms, greater portions of the populace are now constucting online public personas. The best way to understand this proliferation of the public presentation of the self is through the term specular, a two-way mirror of projection on to the screen and the circulation of and interaction with those images and texts into the wider world. What is now well-developed is a specular economy whose foundations are derived from the much longer tradition of celebrity culture and whose repercussions relate to an emerging comfortability with a society of surveillance. © 2010 Springer Science + Business Media, LLC.