Author’s Note: I’ve been asked to be on a potential panel for the 2026 Association of Internet Researchers that will be a gathering of scholars that have focused on and written books about creators and influencers. This proposal is being organized by the brilliant Daniela Jaramillo Dent and Crystal Abidin. This request of being part of the best of the best scholars in our field kickstarted my need to look over and refine my work. This will be the first of several posting reflecting on the work I did for “Digital Culture in the Platform Era: Studying Celebrity, Influence, and Superstars Online.“
Publishing anything for the general public to see causes a continuous conversation in me with a past version of myself based on how I wrote and thought about the concepts that I put to text and shared with others through my presentations. Creating a taxonomy of Internet celebrities for my latest book, Digital Culture in the Platform Era: Studying Celebrity, Influence, and Superstars Online, was a useful first outlet for attempting to define the boundaries of the DIONS Nexus that I was describing in my previous posting. Those six personality types that I focused on in the first part of the book gave my explanation of the breakdown of the different characteristics, traits, attributes, and quarks that distinguish those various Internet celebrities who find their way to the spotlight of online exposure. The concept of the personality type was embedded in my original definition of celebritism that was part of my South-by-Southwest presentation that I gave during the 2011 “Future 15 Sessions” on the “Post-postmodern Celebrity.” It was placed as an attempt to deal with the messiness of defining how one is authentic online during a time when the early adopters of online culture were dealing with the ramifications of more and more platforms being introduced to the average Internet user. In addition, it was an attempt to go beyond the three main types of celebrity that Chris Rojek described in his appropriately titled 2001 book Celebrity, which separates the broad idea of being a celebrity into four distinct categories.
- The ascribed celebrity is one whose fame is inherited or derived from bloodline, family name, or dynasty (e.g., royalty, or children of famous parents). We can point to the nepo babies phenomenological focus as the modern tie to Rojek’s ascribed celebrity model (Foster & Maroto, 2024).
- The achieved celebrity is one whose fame is earned through personal achievements, talents, and recognized, visible accomplishments in fields like sports, art, or business. The spotlight on awards shows during the COVID-19 crisis made the realm of the achieved celebrity visible during a time when everything was becoming still (Deflem et al., 2023).
- The attributed celebrity is one whose fame is manufactured or “assembled” through media, publicity, and intermediaries, rather than through personal effort. Watching journalistic coverage of the attributed celebrity class through the framework that it is a controlled process by the media conglomerations that allow public relations professionals and trained image consultants to control the aesthetics and narratives around this type of celebrity (Hendrickx & Van den Bulck, 2024).
- The celetoid is a person who gains short-lived celebrity through the workings of mass communication, often disappearing as quickly as they appeared (e.g., lottery winners or people involved in brief scandals). This type of celebritism hits on the promotional culture that has become exponentially more vast in the platform era, based on the democratization of access points to fame (Cohen, 2026).
We can also point to the celeactor (one who mimics the presence and authority of the celebrities that they admire), the infamous (one who get the public’s focus based on antisocial behaviors and attitudes), the accidental celebrity (Graeme Turner (2004) describes them as one who was in the right place to get the public’s focus), and the subcultural celebrity (Alexandra Ruiz-Gómez (2019) defines this group as “mediated figures who are famous only by their fan base“). This breakdown was functionally a little different than my attempt to categorize celebritism at the beginning of the 2010s.
I was strictly defining the different types of celebrities based on their reach, with their personalities and their content being a by-product of their reach. It was in my SxSW presentation that I first tied celebritism to how one uses memes (“However in the minimalist world of social media communication, sometimes content creation is shorthanded through the use of memes”) and defined the scope of each category of reach (celebrities having support systems and audiences of more than 50K, microcelebrities starting around 6K and mimicking the practices of celebrities, and nanocelebrities based around 1K and using their knowledge to attract an audience). I selected these numbers based on the state of social media at the time of writing my analysis (around 2009) and with the consideration that this was before the transistion between the average Internet user spending a majority of their time on the open Internet before the true start of the platform era and the majority of average Internet users using the “walled gardens” of those platforms regularly (Musiani, 2015). It was between the 2011 SxSW presentation and finishing up Meme Life that I started to flesh out the bare bones of the theoretical construction to form the six Internet celebrity personality types that I crafted in the first part of Digital Culture in the Platform Era. Putting down the final works on the screen and sending the last of the revision for that book began that conversation that I described earlier.
Since then, I’ve kept thinking. And thinking, for me, means refining. Where I sit after debating, thinking, presenting, and refining this thematic that is now set in stone is a standpoint that the six types were right, but they were incomplete. More importantly, they lacked an organizing architecture that reveals why the types matter. They were merely crafted as six categories that would fit the first part of my book, which would take what I established in 2011 (mainly traditional celebrities and nanocelebrities) and polish the broad middleground of the microcelebrity into clearly defined terms (in the forms of memetic celebrities, platform superstars, influencers, and opinion leaders. There was no logical, systematic approach to this presentation of personality types.
This post is my attempt to correct the lack of a systemic presentation and improve the multitude of definitions associated with this part of the book moving forward. It came down to identifying two major gaps in the writing and organization of the first section of the book. Both of these gaps are minor when it comes to the overall arguments of the book, but are worth noting.
Two Gaps in the Original Framework
The first gap was a conceptual one, specifically doing too much with one of the personality types. My original six types included opinion leaders, which I defined as “those Internet celebrities who have a clearly defined vision for society to follow, can offer compelling evidence to support the need to follow that societal vision, and can improve those lives and communities that are willing to listen to and follow that wisdom through the content that the celebrity creates online.” I was clearly envisioning activists and social issue commentators when writing the third chapter of the book.
Thought Leaders
It was clear after the book was published and working through some new case studies that there is a separate, distinct type that also operates in that general space. I was starting to work on my writing and research when I noticed people whose celebrity is built not around causes or social issues but around simply ideas, frameworks, mental models, and/or philosophical systems that their audiences adopt as interpretive lenses for understanding the world. This type of Internet celebrity is the thought leader, which I am defining as those Internet celebrities who accumulate fame and popularity by developing and promoting mind technologies that are grounded in intellectual frameworks, mental models, philosophical systems, and other lenses of the world that their audiences adopt to internalize practices to deal with their real-world interactions.
Unlike opinion leaders, who mobilize audiences around specific social issues and causes, thought leaders traffic in transferable ways of thinking that followers apply across multiple domains of their personal, professional, and intellectual lives. Unlike nanocelebrities, whose authority derives from credentialed expertise within an established field, thought leaders often operate at the boundaries of disciplines or outside institutional contexts entirely, deriving their authority from the perceived explanatory power and practical utility of their frameworks. Business strategists, self-development gurus, and public philosophers who have built significant online followings around signature ideas exemplify this type. Their celebrity status is inseparable from the intellectual brand they have constructed and the community of practitioners who have adopted their thinking as a guide to navigating contemporary life.
Community Architects
My second gap was a slight structural oversight. My original framework also had nothing to say about a genuinely prominent form of Internet celebrity that doesn’t fit any of the existing six types, in the form of people whose fame derives not specifically from the content they create but from the social ecosystems they build and steward that are independent from the social practices and cultural artifacts that are present in digital communication but are more related to the development of online communities as a means of finding spaces in the chaos that is present in the DIONS Nexus. I’m calling this type of Internet celebrity a community architect.
Community architects are those Internet celebrities who gain recognition on platforms not by the content they create, but through the social ecosystems they build and steward. Their celebrity derives from their role as conveners. They can create the conditions under which communities form and sustain themselves. Their identity can come from being a forum founder, Discord server builder, subreddit moderator who becomes synonymous with their space, and Patreon-based community hosts, as all of these roles fit this personality type.
Unlike influencers, who build audiences that look at the celebrity’s impact on culture, community architects build audiences that look towards the community itself, with the architect serving as the organizing presence that gives the community its identity and norms. What distinguishes them from opinion leaders is that opinion leaders send messages outward and shape thinking. Community architects used relationship-based communication practices to shape belonging and participation. Their fame is inseparable from the community itself, as they are often less recognizable outside their community context than within it. But within that context, they carry enormous social authority.
Identifying these two slight gaps in my categorization of Internet celebrity personality types lead me to re-examine the way that I presented the personality types within the larger context of studying Internet celebrities’ impact on average Internet users.
A New Organizing Architecture
Adding thought leaders and community architects to the original six gives us eight types. But more importantly, it reveals a structural pattern in the framework that wasn’t visible before. The eight types divide into two groups of four, and within each group, the four types pair into two natural couplings that share a deeper logic.
Presence-Based Celebrities
The first grouping of four is the Presence-Based Celebrities, which are those Internet users and public figures whose fame, popularity, and notoriety derive primarily from who they are, how they appear, and the parasocial relationship their audience develops with their personality, lifestyle, and public persona. Their celebrity is fundamentally about the person as a cultural object, with audiences following them for the experience of proximity to that persona rather than for the intellectual or ideological content they transmit.
Conferred Celebrities (traditional celebrities and memetic celebrities) share the characteristic that their fame arrives through external systems rather than being strategically self-authored. Traditional celebrities receive their fame through institutional gatekeeping and media conglomerates, while memetic celebrities receive theirs through the viral mechanics of social sharing. In both cases, fame is something that happens to them as much as something that they pursue.
Ecosystem Celebrities (platform superstars and community architects) share the characteristic that their celebrity is platform-native and environment-dependent. Their fame is inseparable from the specific digital ecosystem they inhabit and have mastered. A platform superstar’s identity is built through consistent, high-quality content tailored to a single platform’s unique affordances, while a community architect’s identity is built through the social environment they have constructed and now steward. Remove the ecosystem, and the celebrity collapses in a way that isn’t true for the other types.
Authority-Based Celebrities
The second grouping of four is the Authority-Based Celebrities, which are Internet users and public figures whose fame, popularity, and notoriety derive primarily from what they think, teach, build, or advocate. Audiences follow them because of the perceived value of the frameworks, expertise, communities, or worldviews they offer. The celebrity functions as a conduit for something beyond their persona, and their following is organized around that content rather than around the person as spectacle.
Aspirational Celebrities (thought leaders and influencers) share the characteristic that their celebrity is built around adoptable ways of living and thinking. Influencers offer aspirational frameworks for consuming and inhabiting the world in the ways that they offer curated lifestyles, aesthetic choices, and product recommendations that audiences can incorporate into their own lives. Thought leaders offer intellectual frameworks for interpreting and navigating the world. They present mental models and philosophical systems that audiences adopt as lenses for their own thinking. Both are, at their core, offering their audiences a way of being that feels worth emulating.
Expert Celebrities (opinion leaders and nanocelebrities) share the characteristic that their celebrity is grounded in demonstrable command of a subject matter. Opinion leaders apply that expertise to social issues, mobilizing audiences around a clearly defined vision of what’s wrong and what needs to change. Nanocelebrities apply that expertise to knowledge translation, making specialized understanding accessible to audiences outside the academy or professional context. Both derive their authority not from who they are or how they live, but from what they demonstrably know.
Quo Vadimus?
It is important to note that I didn’t do this work solely in a fit of “organizational tidiness” to fix something that was bothering me about my book. I began to see patterns in developing this two-group, four-pairing structure that helped me with some basic problematics that were popping up in the research. Namely, I think it helps explain why copying another creator’s strategy so often fails. Someone attempting to find celebritism in their knowledge can not simply adopt what they see influencers doing. Doing so works against their fundamental orientation toward celebritism. Their audience came for expertise, not lifestyle aspiration. We are not dealing with their style (as that is a content issue for another posting and time), as the focus needs to be on the structural question of why the person is seeking celebritism. Understanding which pairing is the better fit is the first step toward understanding what the audience’s expectations are for a given celebrity.
It also explains why the authenticity has a much more limited impact when discussing Internet celebrities, as authenticity is really a presence-based concept. It assumes that what audiences want is access to a genuine self. But authority-based celebrities don’t succeed by revealing themselves. They succeed by offering something their audiences can use in the form of a framework, a community, a body of knowledge, or a worldview. Using these groupings shows us that authenticity isn’t really a factor for half the celebrities on this list. It also reveals in these eight types expressions of deeper structural logic as the two fundamental orientations, four pairings, and eight personality types adds a level of precision when talking about Internet celebrities, as it allows us to use a common language that introduces coherence to dialogues about Internet culture.
The original six types introduced in the book were a starting point. These eight, organized into two groups and four pairings, are a framework with genuine structural logic. It also points to why there are such radically different approaches to fame that all work within platform culture.
Eight Internet Celebrity Personality Types
| Celebrity Grouping | Personality Type | Definition | Example | Reference |
| Conferred Celebrities* | Traditional Celebrities | fame through media conglomerates and institutional gatekeeping | Conan O’Brien | Rojek, 2015 |
| Conferred Celebrities* | Memetic Celebrities | fame through viral spread of likeness and action | Antoine Dodson | Sparby, 2017 |
| Ecosystem Celebrities* | Platform Superstars | fame through platform-specific content mastery | Alanzoka | Senft, 2008 |
| Ecosystem Celebrities* | Community Architects | fame through the social ecosystems they build and steward | Max Haining | Howard, 2009 |
| Aspirational Celebrities^ | Influencers | fame through lifestyle narration and/or brand integration via the cultural artifacts they promote | Lele Pons | Abidin, 2016 |
| Aspirational Celebrities^ | Thought Leaders | fame through transferable intellectual frameworks and mind technologies | Tim Ferriss | Butler, 2012 |
| Expert Celebrities^ | Opinion Leaders | fame through compelling vision and group mobilization around social issues | Malala Yousafzai | Walter & Brüggemann, 2020 |
| Expert Celebrities^ | Nanocelebrities | fame through credentialed expertise made accessible | Dr. Sabine Hossenfelder | Tilton, 2025 |
