The celebrity, everyone's social media pseudo-friend

Interesting exploration of the pseudo-relationships with celebrities that social media enables:

Spitzberg describes how a fan might respond to something like a celebrity tweet and then, days later, see an unrelated tweet from the same celebrity and read meaning into it because they’ve been thinking about the star in the interim period. “This phantom reciprocity may be one of the reinforcing aspects of the sequential and ongoing process of receiving messages from the celebrity,” he says, “which despite going to thousands, can feel uniquely responding to that fan’s devotion.”

It’s almost too obvious to say that one of the appeals of social media is that it puts updates from celebs on a par with updates from your friends. This piece goes a long way to explore the dynamics beyond that.