Kalhan Rosenblatt & Kat Tenbarge: Trisha Paytas & Fandom

Talk summary and resources created by Alex Turvy.

Talk Summary:

NBC internet culture reporter Kalhan Rosenblatt and NBC tech and culture reporter Kat Tenbarge explore Trisha Paytas’ fandom to help us better understand fandoms at-large.

Key Insights and Questions:

• There was an old Tumblr blog called “Your Fave is Problematic”. It is no longer active, but the term “problematic fave” has caught on as a way to describe the phenomenon of fans of people like Paytas.

• Fandom of people like Paytas resembles how people “hate watch” certain shows. Fans aren’t necessarily cheering for her to fail, but they don’t necessarily like her and enjoy the bizarreness of it all. Further, the fandom community celebrates knowledge and context as a marker of in-group membership and the humor is a bonding tool.

Talk Notes & Related Resources:

• Crying on YouTube: Vlogs, self-exposure and the productivity of negative affect

• “This imbalanced dynamic of visibility allows a community to coalesce around the affective labour of a particular – and particularly vulnerable – body, which in turn reveals the paradox at the heart of social media exposure. After all, the very content of crying/anxiety vlogs is about exposing one’s vulnerability in an effort to remedy it through further exposure. In order to claim an affective community based on shared anxiety or tears, YouTubers must emotionally expose themselves, even though the exposure itself – whether in the case of social anxiety or a perceived failure to achieve social expectations – is presumably what has caused them to become vulnerable in the first place.“

• Relationship Formation on the Internet: What’s the Big Attraction?

• “We propose that those who feel that they can better express their true selves on the Internet than they can in their non-Internet areas of life will be more likely to form close relationships with those they meet on-line. We include as two determinants of who might be more likely to locate their true selves on-line those who (1) experience social anxiety in face-to-face settings and (2) are lonely.”

• Parasocial Interaction: A Review of the Literature and a Model for Future Research

• This article is an extensive discussion of parasociality, but Cohen offers a brief definition:

• “...a parasocial relationship [is] one in which “the viewer is engaged in a role relationship with a television persona”. However, it is probably more helpful in this model to regard it as a user response to a figure as if s/he was a personal acquaintance. This response consists of both behavioral responses…and cognitive responses (e.g., making psychological inferences about a figure’s behavior).