More Than Memories? Schema Transference from Media Characters to Real People

This study focused on whether personality traits and evaluations of television personalities are used to make inferences about new Social interaction partners. It tested the hypothesis that priming schemas of television personalities will bias inferences made about a stranger. The results were mixed. Participants in the experimental condition made more biased inferences about a stranger than did participants in the control condition. This transference was not influenced by participants\u27 parasociability, and methodological limitations prevented conclusive study of the influence of affective evaluations in this effect. Future studies should attempt to increase methodological control and introduce a diverse set of measures to test for possible mediating and moderating variables

Reciprocal versus Parasocial Relationships in Online Social Networks

Many online social networks are fundamentally directed, i.e., they consist of both reciprocal edges (i.e., edges that have already been linked back) and parasocial edges (i.e., edges that haven't been linked back). Thus, understanding the structures and evolutions of reciprocal edges and parasocial ones, exploring the factors that influence parasocial edges to become reciprocal ones, and predicting whether a parasocial edge will turn into a reciprocal one are basic research problems. However, there have been few systematic studies about such problems. In this paper, we bridge this gap using a novel large-scale Google+ dataset crawled by ourselves as well as one publicly available social network dataset. First, we compare the structures and evolutions of reciprocal edges and those of parasocial edges. For instance, we find that reciprocal edges are more likely to connect users with similar degrees while parasocial edges are more likely to link ordinary users (e.g., users with low degrees) and popular users (e.g., celebrities). However, the impacts of reciprocal edges linking ordinary and popular users on the network structures increase slowly as the social networks evolve. Second, we observe that factors including user behaviors, node attributes, and edge attributes all have significant impacts on the formation of reciprocal edges. Third, in contrast to previous studies that treat reciprocal edge prediction as either a supervised or a semi-supervised learning problem, we identify that reciprocal edge prediction is better modeled as an outlier detection problem. Finally, we perform extensive evaluations with the two datasets, and we show that our proposal outperforms previous reciprocal edge prediction approaches.Comment: Social Network Analysis and Mining, Springer, 201

The Allure of Celebrities: Unpacking Their Polysemic Consumer Appeal

The file attached to this record is the author's final peer reviewed version.To explain their deep resonance with consumers this paper unpacks the individual constituents of a celebrity’s polysemic appeal. While celebrities are traditionally theorised as unidimensional ‘semiotic receptacles of cultural meaning’, we conceptualise them here instead as human beings/performers with a multi-constitutional, polysemic consumer appeal. Supporting evidence is drawn from autoethnographic data collected over a total period of 25 months and structured through a hermeneutic analysis. In ‘rehumanising’ the celebrity, the study finds that each celebrity offers the individual consumer a unique and very personal parasocial appeal as a) the performer, b) the ‘private’ person behind the public performer, c) the tangible manifestation of either through products, and d) the social link to other consumers. The stronger these constituents, individually or symbiotically, appeal to the consumer’s personal desires the more s/he feels emotionally attached to this particular celebrity. Although using autoethnography means that the breadth of collected data is limited, the depth of insight this approach garners sufficiently unpacks the polysemic appeal of celebrities to consumers. The findings encourage talent agents, publicists and marketing managers to reconsider underlying assumptions in their talent management and/or celebrity endorsement practices. While prior research on celebrity appeal has tended to enshrine celebrities in a “dehumanised” structuralist semiosis, which erases the very idea of individualised consumer meanings, this paper reveals the multi-constitutional polysemy of any particular celebrity’s personal appeal as a performer and human being to any particular consumer

Celebrity: The return of the repressed in fan studies?

Used by permission of the Publishers from ‘Celebrity: The return of the repressed in fan studies?’, in The Ashgate research companion to fan cultures eds. Linda Duits, Koos Zwaan and Stijn Reijnders (Farnham: Ashgate, 2014), pp. 163–180. Copyright © 2014This chapter begins by examining the development of a fan studies mainstream as a process of marginalization of attention to celebrity. It then considers how deductive areas of fan research have also inadequately conceptualized celebrity attachment. Using Gary Boas and Richard Simpkin as examples, the chapter then shows that there are subtle differences between fandom and celebrity following per se. It reaches its climax with a discussion of effervescence: a useful explanatory mechanism from Emile Durkheim’s theory of religion that helps to account for the pleasures of following celebrities. Finally, the chapter contrasts a neo-Durkheimian approach to fandom with some classic and contemporary research on parasocial interaction. I suggest that focusing on fan motivation and affect – perhaps through a refashioning of Durkheim’s work – may help us escape the long shadow of the mass culture critique

Yeah, Right, Uh-Huh: A Deep Learning Backchannel Predictor

Using supporting backchannel (BC) cues can make human-computer interaction more social. BCs provide a feedback from the listener to the speaker indicating to the speaker that he is still listened to. BCs can be expressed in different ways, depending on the modality of the interaction, for example as gestures or acoustic cues. In this work, we only considered acoustic cues. We are proposing an approach towards detecting BC opportunities based on acoustic input features like power and pitch. While other works in the field rely on the use of a hand-written rule set or specialized features, we made use of artificial neural networks. They are capable of deriving higher order features from input features themselves. In our setup, we first used a fully connected feed-forward network to establish an updated baseline in comparison to our previously proposed setup. We also extended this setup by the use of Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) networks which have shown to outperform feed-forward based setups on various tasks. Our best system achieved an F1-Score of 0.37 using power and pitch features. Adding linguistic information using word2vec, the score increased to 0.39

m-Reading: Fiction reading from mobile phones

Mobile phones are reportedly the most rapidly expanding e-reading device worldwide. However, the embodied, cognitive and affective implications of smartphone-supported fiction reading for leisure (m-reading) have yet to be investigated empirically. Revisiting the theoretical work of digitization scholar Anne Mangen, we argue that the digital reading experience is not only contingent on patterns of embodied reader–device interaction (Mangen, 2008 and later) but also embedded in the immediate environment and broader situational context. We call this the situation constraint. Its application to Mangen’s general framework enables us to identify four novel research areas, wherein m-reading should be investigated with regard to its unique affordances. The areas are reader–device affectivity, situated embodiment, attention training and long-term immersion

Personal relevance in story reading: a research review

Although personal relevance is key to sustaining an audience’s interest in any given narrative, it has received little systematic attention in scholarship to date. Across centuries and media, adaptations have been used extensively to bring temporally or geographically distant narratives “closer” to the recipient under the assumption that their impact will increase. In this review article, we review experimental and other empirical evidence on narrative processing in order to unravel which types of personal relevance are more likely to be impactful than others, which types of impact (e.g. aesthetic, therapeutic, persuasive) they have been found to generate, and where their power may become excessive or outright detrimental to reader experience

Death and Communal Mass-Mourning: Vin Diesel and the Remembrance of Paul Walker

This article examines Vin Diesel’s use of his public Facebook Page to mourn the loss of his friend and co-actor Paul Walker in the period from 2013-2015. It discusses how Vin Diesel performed his grief and how his mourning process was communally reflected and repeated by both Vin Diesel and Walker fans, who used Vin Diesel’s page to share and verbalise their own feelings of loss in a both public and safe space. An analysis of Vin Diesel’s own status updates and 1800 comments reacting to three popular status updates related to the death of Paul Walk posted over the course of more than a year show that commentary was used to make condolences to both Vin Diesel and Walker’s familes and to affectively express the users’ immediate feelings, both verbally and through the use of emojis. However, over time, both the form and intensity of expression of both Vin Diesel and his followers changed, pointing to the need to further study celebrity mourning processes on social media over extended periods of time