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Celeb 2.0: How Social Media Foster Our Fascination with Popular Culture Kelli S. Burns. New York: Praeger, 2009.
Kelli S. Burns' Celeb 2.0: How Social Media Foster our Fascination with Popular Culture chronicles the rise of social media and explores its "synergistic relationship" with popular culture (ix). The analysis of "celebrity" is central to only about half of the chapters, but is explored through multiple lenses - how existing celebrities use new media as promotion, how everyday people are made into celebrities through online participation and how audiences enhance and extend their connections with celebrities and other audience members through social media applications. The remainder of the book uses the illusion of intimacy inherent to celebrity as a lens through which to examine other relationships between popular culture and social media. By focusing on social media's ability to transform traditional connections between text, producer and audience, Burns illustrates the (at times uneasy) adaptation of other popular...