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ABSTRACT
This study explores the changing relationship in the digital era between celebrities and fans by examining a group of emerging celebrities and their followers on Twitter. Seven crime authors were chosen as a case sample, each of which published their first work after 2010 and might therefore be regarded as ‘social media natives’. The authors’ followers were categorised according to their self-descriptions into various professional and non-professional groups (e.g. ‘publishing industry professionals’, ‘fellow crime authors’). In some of these groups, notably ‘aspiring authors’ and ‘book fans/bloggers’, the performance of fandom was not always found to be uni-directional. Microanalysis of authors’ interactions with followers suggested that traditional media audience categories such as ‘fan’ have become looser in social media where all users are ‘followers’ and perform multiple identities. In particular, book bloggers seem to have carved out an important role as legitimising agents within the crime fiction field.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1. The timestamps were unfortunately missing from this particular interaction chain.
Additional information
Notes on contributors
David C. Giles
David C. Giles is Reader in Media Psychology at the University of Winchester. He is the author of Illusions of Immortality: A Psychology of Fame and Celebrity (Macmillan, 2000), Media Psychology (Lawrence Erlbaum, 2003) and Psychology of the Media (Palgrave, 2010), along with numerous papers on parasocial relationships and the interactional dynamics of online communication.