The commodified celebrity-self: industrialized agency and the contemporary attention economy

ABSTRACT This article looks at the emerging comfortability with how selling the self has become normalized transnationally. Commodifying the self has been the natural province of celebrities: they use their visibility for their own ends, but also to draw attention to particular issues that are beyond their celebrity value. These activities represent a form of agency and a means of effecting change and a technique to draw collective attention and action to particular events, activities and causes. The kind of agency that celebrities bring to the public world is infused with “Industrialized” Agency. This form of Industrialized Agency (IA) has been naturalized as billions now engage in some form of persona construction for the attention economy through their elaborate uses of social media. This transformation identifies the emergence of a new cultural politics that is connected to the successes of this widespread deployment of IA.