1. An evolution
Celebrities have always had a tenuous relationship with media. On one hand, they need the attention to keep their names in the spotlight.
On the other hand, the media is a vulture, and will turn on you if it smells profits. Britney Spears’ 2007 breakdown was before the advent of social media, driven by an obsessive paparazzi industry. John Terry lost his England football captainship over a media storm just before the invention of Twitter. The impact of the celebrity-media dynamic on individuals is a documented trope.
Social media has changed this dynamic. Celebrities can skip the pipeline and communicate directly to fans. We’re in an age where a single individual can out market major companies - see Lil Nas X.
But it is not just the case that celebrities can reach their fans more easily. The opposite is also true. The distance that existed in the relationship has gone.
Never is this demonstrated more clearly than in the online famous. Having reached their fame non-traditionally, their access to their fanbase is immediate. The evolution of their fan base might make it difficult to see the scale that has developed. They can use social media with their fans the same way they’d use it with their friends.
I cannot shake the overwhelming feeling that this is not healthy.
2. A pioneer
Chrissy Teigen is a case-study on Twitter, and internet fame.
If her goal was to achieve brand recognition through fan interactions, she achieved it. A former model, Chrissy leveraged her humour on Twitter to propel her to new heights - her Wikipedia lists 2 items in her filmography before social media, and 23 afterwards. She was known for dishing out insults in Twitter, what is known as “clapping back”1. If you were a stranger on Twitter, no shot at Miss Teigen would be ignored. She was “one of us”, except she was famous.
If her goal was to become too engrossed with the internet, she also achieved it. Miss Teigen was outed for harassing a 16-year-old girl on Twitter following the girls’ marriage to a 51-year-old man2, which included private messages telling them to kill themselves.
Teigen provides the archetype for overzealous public interactions, but it doesn’t provide an exact comparison for what is happening in the influencer space.
3. Alt accounts, and offline chats
“Alt” Twitter accounts are when people make secondary Twitter accounts. The purpose is to drop the professionalism - not only do you lose platform features such as “Verified” filtering3, but a far smaller percent of your audience will follow secondary accounts - the devoted. Additionally, these accounts can be private. Privacy doesn’t really do much in preventing your tweets getting out there, but it presents a barrier to the intake you receive.
Minecraft YouTuber “Dream” has a plethora of accounts. His main, “@Dream”, a primary alt “@dreamwastaken”, and a secondary alt called “@dreamsecretclub” which is private. If I were to characterize “@dreamsecretclub”, it would be a banal account of his life, along with various diatribes about how he loves his audience. You’d be mistaken for not realizing this person had a following outside of close friends and family.
Twitch streamers have another mechanism for getting close with their fans - offline chats. Offline chat refers to a streamers’ chat room after they have stopped streaming. Outside of streams, this is a mostly desolate place, save a few of the most devoted fans.
When a streamer enters this space, they get a direct connection with their most besotted audience members. Your stream made such an impression to them they stuck around. Talking to these people, the love emanating can feel real. The dopamine production is real. But make no mistake, these people can only see you through the screen.
There are multiple ways of interpreting this close relationship. The cynical route is that this is a method to foster a deeper connection between viewers and influencer. Make the viewers have a perception they can see behind the curtain. A mirage of the “real you”.
The alternative view is that these creators truly want to share these anecdotes, and thrive on the love and attention they get from their audience. An audience that is too numerous to know individually, and too distant to know personally.
A parasocial relationship.
4. Parasocial
Parasocial interaction (PSI) refers to a kind of psychological relationship experienced by an audience in their mediated encounters with performers in the mass media, particularly on television and on online platforms. Viewers or listeners come to consider media personalities as friends, despite having no or limited interactions with them.
Excerpt from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parasocial_interaction
As described earlier, a close connection to fans can be seen as a method to loop them into a parasocial relationship.
There has been a greater push to acknowledge the nature of these one-sided relationships, to ensure that fans aren’t duped into a false sense of friendship. Indeed, much of the above could easily be construed as creators intensifying the parasocial relationship that fans have with them.
In 2020, the YouTuber “theweeklyslap”4 paused his YouTube channel, citing his worry about his audience feeling too close to him, and his worries about revealing himself.
It should be pretty clear to you guys that I don’t want you to know me.
While the worry about the audience getting too close to their creator is well discussed, the inverse too must be considered. A digital creator is a person, just like their fans. When you share your life with the world, and the world responds with adoration, it can feel like a connection.
5. The dangers of being too close
Amidst facing allegations of being complicit in covering for a sexual assault, Twitch streamer Mizkif made a statement and stopped streaming temporarily.
The correct move would be to disconnect from your audience, and indeed, the internet. He intensified his connection.
Chat messages included “i dont know what to do with slick”, “i fucked up in a few situations, and theres a lto [sic] going on, we’ll be ok chat just give me a few days” and “Im still dealing with shit I’ll say something soon”.
Outside of the optics, there are other reasons this is a bad move.
One, your fans don’t know you. They cannot be a source of mental support. Any relationship with them will be distorted through the lens of your success. Your chat rooms are going to contain your more obsessive fans, and so any reaction is inevitably positive. On a darker note, this also means you have to be extremely cautious when pursuing relationships with fans, as the pedestal is already shifted in your favour, and the cliff will be taller with the more enthusiastic ones.
Two, online audiences are fickle. Fickle is used in two senses. Audiences fade over time, or experience churn. The other sense is that the emotion your audience displays towards you can change rapidly.
The emergent behaviour of celebrity communities is one similar to an abuser. When you are in the good books, you are love-bombed with endless praise.
But slip up, and the praise disappears, and the hate becomes all you can see. People stop associating with you, and you become isolated.
Even when the positivity is strong, someone will dislike you. It can be easy to seek that out, and feel overwhelmed with hate, even when it is a small disparate group. Pre social media, the hate would be individuals you’d never hear from. But now you can seek them out.
Dream, whom I mentioned earlier, has a penchant for getting involved in drama. One reason is due to the sheer volume of personal information he doles out. A well-intentioned slipup is picked apart by the internet. A quip about how his hair occasionally “looks like an afro” was translated as a racist microaggression.
His recent, more controversial drama, revolved around the fact that he personally messaged fans 1 on 1. As mentioned before, the cliff between you and your fans is too large, that even if you are talking innocently with them, the conversation can become distorted in their eyes. And if the intention isn’t innocent, that cliff can be abused5.
The perils are avoidable, but the compromise is difficult. Disconnecting yourself from social media is key to this. If you must, treat it purely as a marketing tool, and rely on others to feed back to you.
Distancing yourself from social networks is a difficult choice that regular people struggle with, without the endless attention it provides. However, the long-term mental health benefits cannot be understated.
Here is an internet article chronicling her escapades: https://www.cosmopolitan.com/entertainment/celebs/a8658859/chrissy-teigen-best-twitter-clapbacks/ ↩︎
Most rational human beings would be extremely concerned here. ↩︎
Given recent news, this might change! ↩︎
An alt channel for jschlatt, a popular content creator. ↩︎
Any observation has exceptions. Celebrity/fan relationships can be healthy, but requires careful management. ↩︎