The Friendships Between Fans and Their Idols

The relationship between celebrities and their fans have always been one that sheds the former into a light that makes them almost God-like. When a person gets deified, they become almost untouchable and almost void of being able to have emotions like any other “regular” human. Celebrites are thrown into the public spotlight for all of their wrongs and rights to be on full blast while the same actions performed by other “regular” humans are just seen as human nature and flaws we are all born with.

Uncanny Connections

With the rapid development of technology and access to the internet being introduced to kids nearly seconds after their birth, communicating to others around the world has become much easier and more cost-efficient. It’s no surprise that with this access to the world, relationships that would have been impossible to form just a few years ago are now the main form of connecting and communicating with others These networks brings together people that, if they had met IRL (in real life) before meeting online, their relationships would be drastically different if existent at all.

The Platforms

The beginning of the end of human interactions as we know it began when the telegraph was first invented in 1792. The telegraph was faster than the current method of communication (a horse and rider) and eliminated the need for a horse and rider to deliver messages altogether. Not only did means of communication really begin to change upon the invention of the telephone and the radio in 1890 and 1891 respectively, but the evolution of technology began to also rapidly increase.

In 1940, the first round of super computers were invented. Scientists, engineers, and technologists all together developed newer and more ergonomic computers that soon were in every household. With the access to the internet and the world now just sitting in the homes of every day people, sites that connected everyone to one another emerged, and the first social media site Six Degrees was created in 1997 (Hendricks, 2013). Six Degrees became the starting point of social media. It originally had just two functions: upload a profile and befriend other users. By the early 2000s, Six Degrees was no longer operating, but it carved the path for newer social media sites to take the stage.

YouTube became the first widespread craze after its release in 2005. The site was created for means of sharing videos publicly or privately to the world. In the 14 years that YouTube has been around, it has produced several big-name stars such as Justin Bieber and Kate Upton. The platform has also been the platform for many videos to go viral such as Psy’s “Gangnam Style” and Rebecca Black’s “Friday”.

In 2006, YouTube faced some competition when Facebook and Twitter both became accessible to the public. Despite all three platforms were used for very different reasons (Facebook being a glorified and more opertable version of Six Degrees and Twitter being a Facebook that limited characters in one post), they all became the Golden Trio of social media sites.

The years following YouTube, Twitter, and Facebook, other social media platforms have come and gone, and only a handful have stayed. Some of the biggest platforms that have stayed are Instagram (1 billion active users), Tumblr (335 million active users), and Snapchat (255 million active users) while other sites like Vine and MySpace were left behind.

The Rise of JB

The creation of all the social platforms not only made connecting to friends easier, but it also made connecting to celebrities much more effortless as well. Prior to Twitter and Instagram, celebrities were able to live their lives in relative peace. They were basically demigods -- not quite human, but not fully a god. The only time an average person would be able to interact with a celebrity would be through various gossip magazines or maybe a lucky run-in, but even then, the interactions between celebrities and their fan bases were limited, making it easier for their fans to idolize and deify them.

A prominent example of this is with Canadian pop star Justin Bieber. In 2007, at the age of 13, Bieber’s singing videos were discovered on YouTube by Scooter Braun. Two years later, Bieber released his first studio album, My World, which quickly took the world (and by world, mostly adolescent girls) by storm. And not only was Bieber’s album doing well on the charts, but his following on the social media platform Twitter also proved to be thriving (he was reported to have over 6 million followers by the end of 2010).

Bieber Fever By Beliebers

In order to further investigate how Twitter, Facebook, etc. have changed the ways humans interact with one another, I took to looking at Justin Bieber’s twitter account. Currently, as of April 19, 2019, Bieber has 105 million Twitter followers (see Fig. 01). While this is an impressive number, it is speculated that at least 40 million of them are fake, but that piece of information is relatively irrelevant.

The first tweet made by Bieber that caught my attention was he made a week prior to the United States midterm elections (see Fig. 02). In the thread of replies, Bieber received tremendous amounts of support as well as an equal amount of backlash. As I read the tweets, a recurring theme that happened in both the supportive and hateful tweets was that the user behind said tweets seemed to act as if they knew Bieber on a more personal level, as if the relationship that they had is not one that is strictly behind a screen (see Fig. 03 - 05).

The evidence of this was clear in another tweet Bieber had made (see Fig. 06). In his tweet, Bieber expressed his gratitude to friends. He did not list or tag anyone by name, and whether that was on purpose or not, the fans took it upon themselves to interpret it as a tweet for them. One fan tweeted back a picture of a tattoo she got to honor Bieber along with an explanation on the influence Bieber has had on her (see Fig. 07).

The connection that Justin Bieber’s fans seem to think they have to him is “so strong” that it becomes evident in a tweet made by Bieber in wake of the Manchester shooting during an Ariana Grande concert. Bieber’s manager, Scooter Braun, had been known to help Bieber format tweets here and there in order to maintain a good media image, and in that, Bieber’s fans are always quick to assume which tweets are made by Braun and which are authentically Bieber (see Fig. 08).

While it is a safe assumption to make that most tweets by media-trained mega stars are not coming directly from said person, it’s another level of confidence state a tweet that gives little to no indication that the tweet wasn’t from the celebrity but instead a third party. The only way to know for sure who tweeted it would be if the speculators were in the room at the time of the tweet and were able to clearly see the third party execute the action.

The Cure?

The interactions of celebrities and their fan bases have evolved greatly through the years, and the evidence is strong in the cult following Justin Bieber. While there is strong evidence in other fan bases as well (for the fun of it, looking into the hashtag Larry Stylinson on any platform generates hundreds of thousands of theories and “true” speculations), Bieber’s fan base persists to be the most intense in the nine years he’s been in the limelight.

References

Golbeck, J. (2016, July 28). You’re Not Really Friends With That Internet Celebrity. Retrieved from https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/your-online-secrets/201607/

Heflick, N.A. (2009, December 09). Why We Are Obsessed With Celebrities. Retrieved from https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/the-big-questions/200912/

Lua, A. (2019, January 24). 21 Top Social Media Sites To Consider For Your Brand. Retrieved from https://buffer.com/library/social-media-sites

Sage Research Methods. (2017). Analysing Online Postings: Exploring Television Fandom and Identity. [Online PDF]. Retrieved from https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/blackboard.learn.xythos.prod/5a3199fc4282a/10090271?response-content-disposition=inline%3B%20filename%2A%3DUTF-8%27%27webposts-television-programmes-student-guide.pdf&response-content-type=application%2Fpdf&X-Amz-Algorithm=AWS4-HMAC-SHA256&X-Amz-Date=20190419T181226Z&X-Amz-SignedHeaders=host&X-Amz-Expires=21600&X-AmzCredential=AKIAIL7WQYDOOHAZJGWQ%2F20190419%2Fus-east-1%2Fs3%2Faws4_request&X-Amz-Signature=b07f4f827c9d096860d15593d75fd8f62a873f19af1c054cf20e5aa8f66adad4

Figures

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