“The hierarchy once headed by cinematic stars has apparently shifted as glamorous names from film, TV and other arenas feature alongside one another as equal objects of desire and public interest.”The Michael Jordan phenomenon, as many may call it, is a sign of things to follow. Nike, like the studio owners of old Hollywood, elevated Jordan to the level of god, and racked in profits by the billions. Sports stars have always enjoyed their fair share of public attention along the side of the movie stars. However corporate endorsement pushed the idea of celebrity to a new realm. The images of famous people are marketable products that increased the sale of anything associated with it. It is debatable if Jordan’s shoes really made him jump higher, but the marketing strategy certainly paid off. According to David Marshall,

“[a] celebrity a public individual who participates openly as a marketable commodity serves as a powerful type of legitimating of the political economic model of exchanges and values.”

While the Hollywood stars sold movies, the new celebrities sold just about anything with their name on them.

The connection between economy and the new celebrity is important here because much of the power of celebrity resides in their abilities to generate income for their associates. Heaps of magazines and tabloids depend their livelihood on the fact that no matter what a celebrity does, it makes news that sells. And the more news a certain person sells, there would be more attention given to them. It is almost a sort of self-fulfilling prophecy.

According to Neal Gabler, a leading scholar in the field, celebrity attracts so many attentions because we, the people, want to read about their stories. He made an important distinction between famous people, such as Dick Cheney, and a celebrity, such as Britney Spears. Dick Cheney is not a celebrity because no one rave about every little event that he attends, or every little mishaps that he encounters. However with people like Britney Spears, there are paparazzi following her every move. If she scratches the car in the adjacent parking spot, then tomorrows headlines would be filled with “Britney crashes in to a car due to drunkenness.”

Celebrity also suggest a sense of temporary fame. According to the prominent cultural historian Daniel Boorstin, “a celebrity is a person who is known for his well-knownness.” This is more so then ever, because one does not have to look very hard to find people who are famous because they are under the spotlight. There is no substance underneath all the glory. So when the spotlight moves away, the individual has no other ways of reclaiming it again. Of course, it is relatively easy to get under such spotlight in today’s society. The internet, the reality TV series, game shows and competition, all has the ability to make someone famous. However it is exactly due to this accessibility that fame today is elusive.

The age of mass media has changed the idea of fame forever. In Joshua Gamson’s words what is now in place is a system where “Surface has overwhelmed substance, image has overtaken reality, and truth is submerged in a sea of irrelevance.” The values of life-style and consumption have pushed aside those things that really matters. With celebrities as its vehicle, the economical forces of today’s America have pushed superficiality to a new extreme. Even though Hollywood’s glamor was carefully fabricated through the images of the stars, it never sold itself as the reality. Fame today on the other hand floats under the guise of reality television, game shows, contests and especially tabloid generated lives of celebrities.