 To start this, I want to say who I am. I am Julius Rasmus. I am the commissioner of the symposium committee of flow, study association flow. And we are a study association of data science, communication information science, and cognitive science and artificial intelligence. We have over 800 members, and we organize informal and also formal activities. If you like these activities, please become a member. And if you like these activities, please become an active member. We're always looking for you. We organize this together with Studium Generale, with Hannah. And Studium Generale goes past your normal study program. They want to organize academic and also cultural activities. And if you want, you can also get a certificate if you go to five academic activities. In one calendar year, you write a little reflection. And people know you're better than the average student. So let's start. Where does this start? Taylor Swift is not your BFF, Parasocial Relationships. Where does it start for me? For me, it starts here. Harry Styles, my BFF, I would say. Harry Styles, I'm his friend. I feel like I know him. He belongs to me. I went to his concert. I bought a ticket. And there were 49,000 other friends, three nights in a row. So I thought, I'm his friend. I know about him, but he doesn't know me. That's weird, right? Maybe that's a good idea for Symposium. So I asked my committee. I said, what do you guys think of Parasocial Relationship? What does it mean to you? And they said, Taylor Swift, which coincidentally is his ex or he is her ex, depending how you look at it. And I started to think, oh, maybe I should look up something about Parasocial Relationship because I know about it, but I don't really know a lot about it. So I started to Google to find answers to my questions. But I only found more questions because I found this article. I'm obsessed with Elon Musk. I should probably break up. And I thought, is that even possible, a Parasocial Relationship? The person doesn't know you. Can you break up? What do you do? Do you send a text? Hi, Elon. I'm no longer a fan. Thank you so much. And follow. Well, what does it mean? So I started looking further. And I found this, a psychologist warning against Parasocial Relationships that they are dangerous. And I thought, well, I have a Parasocial Relationship with Harry Styles, 150,000 other people do. So this is a big problem, right? And Taylor Swift, she broke Ticketmaster in the US. This is a global issue, I suppose, if it's so dangerous. And therefore, I wanted to know, maybe you have different views about what a Parasocial Relationship is. So we made a Wook Lab. Please scan the QR code. And, oh, wow, 26 people, 27. Very nice, very nice. OK, I have some questions for you. The first one, I would like to ask it's a poll. Are you in a Parasocial Relationship right now? Is there anybody like Harry Styles or Taylor Swift or Matty Healy, Sean Mayer, Taylor Lautner? OK, OK, only 25%, one in four people. And a lot of people, maybe, maybe, that's a great answer. Because what does it mean? And if you have a Parasocial Relationship, who do you have it with? Who is your advocate on the left? Wonderful. I don't know what it means. Joost Klein, oh, it's Joost Klein, our Euro Daddy. Somebody said my lecture. I'm very glad that Taylor Swift is actually the largest here. You guys are doing well. Otherwise, this would have been a tough shit. That's very nice. And if you have a Parasocial Relationship, what word do you think fits best for their Parasocial Relationship? Jelis Graasme, yeah, he is sexy. One-sided, sad. Comforting, OK. Somebody thinks it's sad. Somebody thinks it's comforting. So that's already conflicting, right? That's what is it good? Is it bad? Obsessive, oh, I'm not sure if that's totally OK. Imagination. That's definitely true. OK, perfect. And the person you have a Parasocial Relationship with, or that celebrity, what does that person need to do for you to stop supporting them? Crimes. Oh, a master shot. Yeah, what kind of crimes? Nothing. Post a girlfriend. I know, right, if Pedro Pascal wasn't single. That's quite the list of things a person can do. And then I have a question which has a correct answer. How many people are in a Parasocial Relationship? You answered it for yourself, but we want to know what is the actual amount if they measured it in academic papers. And we found, I think most people voted, that indeed, 51% is in a Parasocial Relationship. But no, it's not 51% who actually admitted to being a Parasocial Relationship. It's only 20%. So a lot of people say, no, I'm not in a Parasocial Relationship, but realistically, they are. So that also means that the definition people have of a Parasocial Relationship doesn't fit with the reality that people, the way people behave. Then this is the part where we go to the title, are you a fan of Taylor Swift? And we have a lot of no's, but also a few yeses and a hard yes. So I think some people might say, Taylor Swift, is there BFF, I suppose? And therefore I want to know, do you know how many streams she had? She was the most streamed artist worldwide after her bad bunny. And indeed, she had more than 20 billion streams. She had 26 billion on Spotify alone. So take that as you will. Everybody in the world basically listened to her, which is commendable, I suppose. And maybe she is a good artist. People listened to her. But how many miles did she fly during the week of the Super Bowl? And for your reference, Amsterdam to New York is 3,600 miles. So did she do it both ways? And yes, she did fly 19,000 miles. She flew from Los Angeles to Tokyo to Las Vegas and then back to Sydney, Australia, all in the span of one week. And she polluted just as much as 11 people Americans would do on a yearly basis in one week. So approximately, she has the pollution carbon footprint of 500 to 600 people on average. And that's quite a lot. So I wanted to know, how does that make you feel? Yucky. And there I already see the first person who really is in a parasocial relationship with her, saying she's rich, so maybe even defending. And hopefully, we will learn today about this. So I want to explain a little bit about how we are going to do this today. We have two wonderful speakers. They are both going to do a TED Talk, and after which, you can ask questions. And after both of them are finished, we're going to do a panel session. And you can discuss with them questions or critique you might want to give. So the first speaker, she started in University of Antwerp, was assistant professor, got a PhD on online aggression, such as cyber bullying. Now she does research also on online persuasion, but also works together on research for influencer marketing. Please give her an applause, Sarah Pabian. Perfect. So I hope you can hear me well. Yes? All right, so let's get started. You can also just say Sarah Pabian, because I'm from Belgium. I indeed conducted my PhD at the University of Antwerp, but I work now for already four years here at Tilburg University. I do a lot of research on online aggression, but I'm also really intrigued by influencers. I think this started because my students asked me doing research on this, especially because they also wanted to do research on this topic for their thesis. And then I started working on this topic here at Tilburg. We also have some interesting colleagues who are doing research on the topic. So that's why I'm still involved in this topic. And I'm especially interested in influencers and how we can use them for the good. But today I will be talking both about the good and not so good on social media. And let's jump immediately into the topic. I think I need to start my talk with first explaining what I perceive as a celebrity and a social media influencer. I think these are different types of persons. For me, a social media influencer is somebody who got their fame via social media. So it's a bottom up approach. So they started doing something on social media and then they had a lot of followers and then they got fame because of that, because of what they are doing on social media. Celebrity most of the times have their celebrity status based on other activities. Maybe also on social media, but they are a singer, or an actor, or they are good in sports, or whatever. But they got their fame via another way. Of course, they are also very present on social media, also traditional channels like television and so on. But they didn't got their fame on social media. Although nowadays, of course, they're also very present on social media because that's also expected from them. Social media influencers, they share a lot about themselves online. They feel the need to do that because it's part of who they are. And it's also expected. Followers expected to share a lot of their private life with the followers. If they don't do that, then they get private messages. Hey, why haven't you posted something about your love life or something like that? With celebrities nowadays, they also have that kind of expectation. So nowadays, people, fans also expect that they know a lot about Taylor's private life, her love life, her love for other things as well. So both of them are online, although they got their fame from some other sources, but there are clearly some similarities between celebrities and social media influencers. Much of my work is on social media influencers, but there are a lot of things that we can also apply to celebrities. So now that we know that, we can talk about social influence. What is social influence? I've added the definition here. It's a change in an individual's thoughts, feelings, attitudes, or behaviors as a result of an action of another person. Translated to the social media environment, if I'm an influencer and I post something online, then maybe I can influence my audience, my followers, based on what I have posted. Maybe I have posted a beautiful picture of myself with my puppy, and I have a puppy, so I would be able to do that. And then maybe when you see my cute little taller puppy, you also want to buy one. So then I'm influencing you. I'm convincing you of the fact that you should buy the talk because it will help you in doing exercise. You get very happy, lots of hugs and kisses, and you have the perfect life, something like that. So we see a lot of social influence coming from celebrities, social media influencers. They can influence their audience. They do that in different ways, and we make a differentiation between two types of social influence. On the one hand, we have the informational social influence, and on the other hand, we have the normative social influence. When I'm talking about informational social influence, I'm talking about information that is shared by an influencer, information that you can use, for instance, to make decisions. For instance, you're following a food influencer. The food influencer is posting a review of a new kitchen tool. You are considering buying one, but you're not 100% sure. So you're looking at what is posted by the food influencer, and you use that information in your decision of buying the tool or not. And so that is informational social influence. But we also have normative social influence. Normative social influence is more about seeing how others behave. For instance, on social media, you see how Taylor is behaving or how another social media influencer is doing things. And in this way, you learn from that behavior, and you also perceive it as a norm. For instance, if you see a social media influencer drinking cocktails on Friday evening, you might think that this is the way to go, that on Friday evening, you should drink cocktails with your friends if you want to be hip or popular and so on. So that is normative social influence. And they work in different ways. For instance, the informational social influence can be explained by internalization. This means that you're accepting more easily information that aligns with your own interests. For instance, if you're a foodie, if you love food, then it's more easy that you accept the information of the food influencer because you're interested in this kind of stuff. We also have the source credibility theories, a very famous theory that is used to explain why influencers have an influence on us. We perceive influencers as credible, as trustworthy, as a source of information. We think they are reliable. They are not lying. They are telling us the truth. You should really buy this kitchen tool because it's working like this and that. And in this way, it can also influence you. For the normative social influences, there are some other processes going on. First of all, we have compliance. Imagine that an influencer is performing certain type of behavior. For instance, drinking cocktails on Friday evening. You might think that consuming every week a certain amount of alcohol is not so good, but you still want to fit in this group of followers and therefore you're also sharing a post of yourself on Friday evening of you drinking cocktails because you don't want to get punished for not performing the behavior that is expected. So although it does not really fit with your own values and beliefs, we're still doing the behavior because you think it's expected from you. That's compliance. And then we also have identification and imitation. And I think this one is a really important one. And I also cite in your answers that we look up to influencers. We see them as role models. And indeed, if we see somebody as a role model, we want to imitate them, especially if we think they are very cool and you really like that person, but it's more easy that you are also going to imitate that behavior or copycat that behavior. Well, I had one more thing that I wanted to add here and that's of course the parasocial relationship because the parasocial relationship has a large influence on those processes. If you have a connection with the influencer or one-sided connection, if you look up to that person, if you perceive that person as a friend, then those processes will happen more easily. For instance, if you feel that you have a connection with Taylor Swift, then you might imitate her behavior more easily because you perceive that person as a real friend, you trust her, you also want to be like that person and in this way you're also going to imitate her behavior. So the parasocial relationship has an influence on those processes and it makes it more easy to so that these processes take place and so it really strengthens the mechanisms. All right, and then I added some examples of different posts that I found online. Here we have some food influencers and they are promoting something. They made recipes based on Oreo's cookies, which is nice but not so healthy, right? Some other examples of maybe not so good influencing is for instance, a vape influencer. It's the first time that I heard of that when I was doing my research. Come on, is there a market for that? Yes, we have Mike Phapes. Apparently he seems very popular and he gives you some insights on vaping and new products and so on. What we also very often see is alcohol posts. This is a very explicit post, right? So this influencer is promoting something. I don't know what it is, a drink. But we also see it implicitly. For instance, maybe not a sponsored post but if they're just posting a picture of themselves with friends and we see in the background some drinks on the table. This is maybe also influencing but in a bad way because it can influence young people, learn them. That indeed on Friday nights they should drink cocktails with their friends. Risky selfies. I don't know if you've ever heard of those. You've probably seen these, right? People are standing on very tall buildings or on a cliff or on rail tracks and so on. Places that are dangerous and you should be very careful if you're in this position but if you're taking a picture then you don't have eye for your surroundings which makes it very dangerous. We see these pictures online. We also see that they can motivate others to also take such a picture and that's also influencing for the not so good, I think. Then I've added also this one. You've brought, I see some people. Yes, natural contraception. I think hot topic right now, right? I get it on my feet all the time and I found it not so good because there's a lot of misinformation going on with regard to this topic. Also, I think influencing for the not so good. So some of these influencers believe that they have certain knowledge about the topic although I don't know if they really have that knowledge. Maybe they see themselves as somebody with experience but of course they're not a scientist. So this is worrying that they might be spreading information that is not scientifically tested or that's not true. We also know that some people indeed online post information that is not true. I don't have to explain that. This is also something that we know that is a problem online that you show pictures of yourself that are very beautiful but that are not real, right? And in this way you give the impression that you should look like this if you want to be popular hip and so on. So one of these pictures is real. I think you can easily notice which one it is but that one is probably not posted online. So also influencing for the not so good because you're learning, especially young people, how to look like at the beauty centers and so on. Oh yeah, and then I added this example. I don't know if you know the song Bad Bloods, the fans of Taylor probably know this song. I've added the piece of the lyrics. So it's now we got prop, I'm not going to sing but yeah, you don't want that. Now we got problems and I don't think we can solve them. You made a really deep cut. Now we got Bad Bloods. Yeah, I was thinking that you could be trusted, that you have to ruin what was shining. Now it's all rested and so on and so on. So when this song came out, everybody was thinking that it was about like a romance that ended, right? But then fans started speculating because they've heard that there was a conflict with another celebrity. Do you know who? Oh yeah, she's in the picture. Yeah, Katy Perry. Yeah, so this was in 2014 already a long, long time ago but there was some kind of conflict. So this song came out and then people start speculating like, yeah, we heard rumors that there is something going on between Taylor and Katy. They used to be very good friends but now they're not. And then there was this interview where Swift was saying, well, this song, my new song, Bad Blood, it's not about the romance, it's actually about somebody in the music industry and so on and so on. And then the next day, Katy Perry posted, watch out for the Regina George in Sheep's Clothing. Regina George is a character of Mean Girls. Sheep's Clothing, it means that somebody is pretending to be nice, but in the inside is really feeling bad and so on. I think this is really interesting because they were clearly having a discussion of fight, although they were not mentioning names but it was quite clear that it was, they were addressing each other but it's also interesting how it influenced their fan bases because there was like a huge clash between Katy Perry fans and Taylor Swift fans. And me as a researcher on online aggression, I was especially intrigued by this example because I was thinking, how can this also influence negative behavior? And indeed we saw also hurtful comments, things that came from the one fan base to the other. So it's clearly that they also, yeah, the fans wanted to stood up for their celebrity but I think they also served some kind of role model here that they learned their fans also how to behave badly online as. So that's why I also wanted to show you this example of influencing for the not so good because I think that especially young people who are still learning to navigate in the online world, they can learn from celebrities influencers on how to behave online. And sometimes it can be in a very bad way. For instance, influencers, we had like a big clash between two influencers, ACID, you know, and probably is also known in the Netherlands. And then Sammy, it's like a couple, Selina, Michelle, Michiel, I don't know. And they had like fights. They were mentioning names and like throwing things to each other. But actually they had to make some really bad role models because young people can learn in this way how you should behave or not behave but they'll learn that making trained stuff to each other is something that you can do online and they cannot apply it to their own environments as well. So that's not so good, right? Do you think of any other examples of influencing for the not so good? There are many more, but yeah, yeah. Can you repeat it because I stopped the count? Yes, so Donald Trump sabotaging the elections, yeah, yeah. That's what you mean, right? Yeah, yeah, all right, good. Another example? Yes, yeah, yeah. Indeed, fast fashion promotion by Sheen, right? Like the, yeah, yeah, and others similar. Yeah, yeah, indeed, yeah, yeah. Good one, yeah. Yes, yeah, promoting plastic surgery. Yes, yeah, yeah, all good examples. And there are many more, right? So there's also a lot of influencing for the bad but there's also influence for the good. Well, first one, lunchbox. If you want to be a perfect mother, maybe that's not influencing for the good but a healthy lunchbox for your child. It could look like this in this way. Then we have Kaylee Itzinas. I don't know how you pronounce her name. Yeah, she's very well known, right? Like one of the first fitness influencers. We, me and my group, we also do a lot of research on fit influencers, how they can influence us for doing physical activity and they can influence us. So that's good. They're also unfortunately negative-sized or negative consequences as well. But they can influence us in a positive way. For instance, learning us about contraception, sexual health. Here, this person, this influencer is talking about a smear test that is for physical screening, you know, bar mood, house cancer screening. So these are very important topics. So it's important that somebody talks about it and maybe provide some information that is not always that easy accessible. Yeah, for instance here, the lady is giving a tour. Of course, she's not showing all details, but she takes you with you to her test. And then you can learn how this routine is going. So it can be very comforting for women who wants to do it, but are still in doubt of doing it and so on. Any other examples of the good you're thinking about? Oh, yeah. And videos like study with me? Yes, yeah, good one. Yeah, yeah, do you often use that? That's interesting. Sometimes, and I don't know, yeah. Then point out, once you look something up and then there's someone studying, so oh yeah, then I can do it also. Yes, I don't know if you heard it in the back. So the example is studying with me, like videos about people showing their routine and studying how they study. Yeah, that's a good example. There was another example, yeah? Yes, videos on the influencing, where influencers are talking about items that they used or promoted before, but that might be not so good, yeah? Good one, yeah. Well, we're on the topic, but she knows that her fan base is a lot of young people and during their election season, she's very, like there's usually at least a post encouraging people to go vote. It's never necessarily about a specific person, but it's always like, go vote. Yeah, yeah. You're right, and I think that's a nice thing. Yeah, so here we have a Taylor Swift example, really good that you're sharing this with us, so that Taylor is promoting to vote, to go voting, because you know, in America, it's not obliged, but she's promoting, especially young people, to go voting so that they also know the importance of it. Yeah, with regard to voting, you've probably also seen it, maybe, in the news the past weeks, that there was also a lot of conspiracy theories about Taylor influencing her followers to vote on Biden. So yeah, yeah. Okay, another one, yeah? Yeah, maybe go find some pages. Yeah, yeah. Collect ones for free. Yes, yes, influencers that are reaching out to their audiences to ask to donate some money for good causes. Yeah, definitely, good examples, all right. So let's continue, otherwise it will be completely over time. I want to talk now about influencer marketing, because I'm a communication scientist, and we know influencers can influence us for the good, and not so good, but of course, they also influence us for products, influencing us to consume stuff, right? And when we look at influencer marketing, yeah, I had an example of a clip. Maybe I can show you a video, an advertisement in which Taylor was present. I think this was used in the Super Bowl. So I'm trying to get the clip on the screen. Yeah, this was this, right? Yeah, I want to... Venture X card from Capital One gives you premium travel benefits, like two times miles on every purchase. The noise cancelling, you're being too loud. Thank you, good choice. Oh, lucky number. Earn five times miles on flights. I'll do your stay. Going up? And 10 times miles on hotels through Capital One travel. Plus, get access to over 1,300 airport lounges. Light line, please. And maybe, see the one and only Taylor Swift. Capital One, what's in your wallet? Yeah, so yeah, this is definitely like a paid collaboration between Taylor and this credit card company. And I would call this type of advertisement, an advertisement that was created by the client or by a marketing agency, but Taylor was present in there. So she was like an endorser. She endorsed the brand or the product. But in this case, it was not Taylor making the video. She was present there and she played a role in it. But what we also see is with influencers is that they often create the content themselves, right? And I looked for examples on Taylor's Instagram page, but I actually didn't find that many. I found an old one, a video where she had a Starbucks cup in it, but I didn't find any content that she created or not a lot of content that she created herself. And of course, if she would create content, I don't think she would make it. She would give you the impression that she made the content, but probably somebody else did it. But of course, with social media influencers, we see that they create a lot of content themselves for promoting things like products, brands. But of course, they can also promote good things, like eating healthy, doing physical exercise, and so on. So I wanted to talk a bit about what works. What are the opportunities of working with influencers if you want to promote something? Oh yeah, and here's an image of Taylor with the Starbucks cup. So it was actually, this image comes from a video where she was talking about autumn and that she was enjoying also some nice things of autumn. And then there was like a flash of this picture in that video. Suddenly she appears there with a cup of Starbucks and I was like, ah, this is not an incident or an accident or this is not on purpose that the cup is there, of course. This is a paid collaboration. If we use influencers for promoting something, if you are a brand that want to collaborate with influencers, or we are, for instance, an NGO and we want to promote something, for instance, raising some funds, convincing people to donate money. Yeah, there are some opportunities for us if you work with influencers. First of all, we have targeting. Targeting means that influencers and celebrities have like an audience, a niche audience that have many things in common. They have certain interests because otherwise they would not follow the celebrity or influencer. So as a product or a brand or an organization that wants to reach out to certain people, that makes it very interesting to work with influencers because they have such a base, a fan base or a follower base that are so similar. So if you want especially to reach out to females from a certain age group, you can easily link it with a certain influencer. So that makes it really good that you have like a very specific audience, the audience that you want to reach. Also spillover effects. Good characteristics of celebrities, of influencers can spillover to your products. Tailors, I don't know, are good characteristics that much. That she's good looking, that she's nice, that she's a good singer or other positive aspects can also spillover to the product. Maybe we now think if we think about Starbucks, we link it with Taylor Swift and we also, those good characteristics of the influencer spillover to the product. So that's also interesting. What you sometimes see is that brands different influencers because they want each having their own personality and specific characteristics and they want to spillover those characteristics to their products. Creativity, influencers, and now I'm not talking about the celebrities, but those that create their own content, authentic content are very creative, right? That's why they have so many followers. They post very authentic content, content that represents them and always characterized by creativity. Some nice aspects that are very typical for that influencer. So if you let them create their own content about your products, you probably have some very interesting, attractive posts about your product. And then we have trust and of course, the parasocial relationship. Of course, if you collaborate with a celebrity influencer, their followers, their fan base will have high trust in them. So they perceive their endorsements as reliable, as trustworthy and it will then convince them to also buy these products or to also perform this type of behavior. There are also some risks clearly. First of all, we have content control and inconsistencies and I think this also, especially the content control applies to social media influencers who create a post because you want them to be creative. You as an organization or as a brand, you give them some directions. Please, could you make a post for us in which you promote this product? But yeah, you do not give them very strict directions because you want them, the influencers, to create authentic content. So if you give strict guidelines, your posts should look like this and that and that and you don't have that authentic content. So you give them some loose directions but it's also dangerously because it can be that they create content about your product that not really is in line with what you want to tell about your product. So that's also a risk. And inconsistencies, for instance, you're collaborating with an influencer to promote drinking water, that's nice. But what you notice is that one month later that influencer is promoting Coca-Cola. And this is a real story, yeah. So yeah, then your whole campaign about water, yeah, it's completely lost, right? Because there is like an inconsistent story over here. It's not reliable at all that the influencer is promoting water in the beginning of the month and Coca-Cola at the end of the month. So some inconsistencies. Of course, also, like if there are scandals, if you collaborate, if an influencer is collaborating closely with a product and then there's like a big scandal, it will also have an influence on your product. I think about some bad things. We saw some examples that you had put it in the questionnaire about when you would end your parasocial relationship. If you are like a brand that is working with an influencer and then this is happening, yeah, it will also have negative influences for your brand. All right. Yeah, there's also a lot of deep fake going on. So here I have an advertisement. Taylor Swift here, due to a packaging error, we can't sell 3,000 LaCruzette cookware sets. So I'm giving them away to my loyal fans for free. If you're seeing this ad, you can get a free LaCruzette cookware set today. But just a heads up, there are a few rules. You must live in the United States and you can only get one free kitchen set per household. All you have to do is click the button below and answer a few questions. These will only be given out until the end of the day today. So don't hesitate. Supplies are running out. So get yours while you can. Thank you guys for all your support. It's completely fake. So unfortunately. As far as the email. Taylor wasn't giving away those Cruzette pots, unfortunately, although in the past, she indicated somewhere apparently that she's a fan of this brand. But somebody used that information and made this video. It was a fake advertisement on Facebook. But what people did was they clicked on the website. Then they had to like give their credit card details and they had to pay like a shipping fee because then they would get their Cruzette pots or whatever. But of course they never got a kitchen where. It was fake. So we also see that online often. And then I want to, I'm almost at the end of my talk, but I wanted to say something about research that we are doing here at Tilburg University in the Department of Communication and Cognition. And maybe if you're interested in the study and maybe in the future, you have to look for some interpretation or like an internship. And if you're interested in doing that on this topic, you might want to reach out to our group. So we are a group of researchers that are doing research on social influence. We are especially interested in influencing for the good, but we're also involved in research on influencing. I'm not so good. And we do many different things. For instance, we look at influencers and wellbeing and how they can influence their followers with regard to wellbeing, but also how influencing being online can influence the wellbeing of the influencer. That's a lot of influencing in one sense I said, but how their job, how they're, what they are doing online also influences their own mental health and wellbeing. And of course, we are interested in influencers to promote healthy behaviors like healthy eating, physical exercise, sex education, smoking and other stuff. For instance, how influencers can be used to raise awareness on cyberbullying. This is a project that I did last year where we worked with influencers to learn young people positive bystander behavior. What young people can do if they are a witness of cyberbullying because not a lot of students know what to do. So we used influencers. We worked with Shaden Lanz, for instance. I don't know if you know him. He's a smaller influencer. He's Dutch. And we collaborated with him. So what we did was we asked him to share his experiences with online hate speech with cyberbullying. So with hateful comments that he receives, unfortunately, daily. And he shared that in classrooms. And like it was very surprising to me that students were, first of all, listening because when I give a talk about cyberbullying, they're like, huh, there is that old lady talking about social media. Is she on social media? Yeah, she is. And so on and so on. But yeah, they were like, oh, wow, an influencer in our school, let's take a selfie. Yeah, great, great. But then Shaden showed examples of the negative comments that he receives daily. And then he showed also the numbers of the likes on those negative comments. And students were really shocked like, oh my God, they are liking these messages, even at death threats and so on. So this was actually a real eye-opener for the young people. Also, Shaden shared how he was coping with this. He shared that he talked a lot about it with his mother, for instance. And he also reported it. He explained how he also sought support among friends and so on and so on. So yeah, that was nice, I think, because it made a big impact on young people. He also shared the impact of these events on his health and especially his mental health. So he definitely made an impression. And that also made me think about how we can further use social media influencers for this topic, but maybe also for other topics. So then I asked young people to do something for us, to create storyboards of how a video should look like, a vlog of an influencer who's promoting cyberbullying, well, in the negative way, who's making awareness of cyberbullying or who's promoting positive bystander behavior. And it became clear that students want to see or young people want to see a few things. First of all, they want to see a clear message. I think that you also like that when an influencer has a clear message for you, like a call to action, do this, go to the store and buy this product or in this case, for instance, if you see something online that is not so nice, please report it to the platform. For instance, there's a very clear message and it also is a call to action to do something on cyberbullying. Young people also like personal stories, like the events that Shaden shared, but they would really like to see that in the video of an influencer. So this means that if I'm an organization who is willing to do something on cyberbullying, I need to find an influencer who has personal experiences with this type of behavior. Also, they really like the own style or the authentic content. So if you're an organization collaborating with an influencer to do something on cyberbullying, it's important that what you create fits with the rest of the posts that that influencer is posting. So there should be like a style that is like the rest of the posts, right? That you clearly can identify with the content, that it's not something strange that pops up on your timeline, but something that really fits within what you normally see on social media. And then students also value the touch of humor. Okay, it's a serious subject, but if you can add some humor in it, some like an element that makes it also attractive to watch the whole video, then you have like the perfect mix. All right, and with that I wanted to conclude. I have some reading materials for you. Yeah, so if you are interested in the subject, you might want to check out these things. So that's it I think for now. Thank you very much. Thank you. Are there any questions for Sarah right now? I have one small question. Yeah, all right. You talked about the way influencers influence their followers, but when they are sponsored, for example, when a company pays them for an ad or for a campaign, the sponsorship of that campaign also influences the relationship between the influencer and the follower. Do you know what happens when an influencer posts influencer marketing, what happens between the relationship with their followers? Oh yeah, yeah. So of course there are some guidelines, rules that they need to adhere to nowadays. For instance, if they are collaborating with a brand, they need to disclose that they are collaborating with them. There is actually quite a lot of research on that, about the influence of really disclosing that you're collaborating with a brand on the parasocial relationship for instance. And actually I think there is like some conflicting results, but most of the followers, it seems that most of the followers appreciate it if they're open about that collaboration. Clearly indicate like this is a paid sponsorship. I've been paid for this, for making this post, but it is important that what they share is still honest. So I think even influencer would post only very positive things the whole time about all the products that the influencer is testing, then I think your level of trustworthiness will go down. But if you give like an honest review about the product that you've been using, like you're giving the advantages, but also the disadvantages, I think that will make you like, or the followers will have the impression that you're trustworthy, and that will not influence the relationship, I think. Is that an answer to your question? Yes, thank you. Somebody else also have a question? Yes? Do you think that because the research you do or read about makes you be less easily or respond differently to influencers or people online? That's a good one. I don't have time to follow influencers. So no, good question. I definitely think that's not only me, but maybe after today you as well, when you know a bit the mechanisms, that you might be a bit more skeptical. So skeptical with regard to what you see online, I think all of you are students here. You learn to be critical about what you see online. So I think this will definitely influence how you look at posts of social media influencers, for instance, and will definitely also influence you, how you look at those recommendations. Yeah, convinced that it has an impact because you have that knowledge of the mechanisms, how it works, the processes. Yeah, behind it, so probably it will influence you in some way. Yeah, yeah. That was another question. Yeah, we also have a question from the back. Yeah. Do you think that people can form power social relationship with non-living objects like video game characters and stuff? Yes, very good point. I didn't talk today about, for instance, virtual influencers. And we see that they are online, right? And they are very popular at the moment. So yes, it seems that people can get influenced by those influencers, but when we are talking about the parasocial relationship, there we need more research because the first studies are indicating that people find it difficult to follow or to form a connection with somebody who is not real, for instance, a virtual influencer. Or there's also research on chatbots where you can really form a friendship with it or that you can become a friend of a chatbot. It seems that, yeah, the more human, some, yeah, the more human the agent is, the more human is, the more characteristics it shares with a real human, the more easily it is to form that relationship, although it's still present in the back of our head that this person is not real, right? And this is something that we still value very much, like authenticity, like that there's the idea that there's a real person behind it, a real person who's also experiencing emotions just like you, who's also going through rough times, sometimes. So there's definitely more room for research, but it seems that, yeah, like those virtual influencers are missing some characteristics to form that close connection, yeah. Wow, wonderful. I think we can continue to the second talk if some people have questions in the panel session, you can still ask them. So for our next speaker, she's an assistant professor at Tilburg University, online culture. She does research on online fandom, online discourse analysis, and parasocial relationships and the difference between micro-influencers and celebrities. Please welcome Mingyi Ho. So today I actually have a few message for you and the first message is this. So if you come from media psychology, if you come from communication science, I apologize to all of you, but parasocial relationship is a dirty word in the field of cultural studies. And cultural scholars, when they hear the word, they will give you this face. They don't like it. They avoid talking about psychology in cultural analysis of fandom. And I will show you why is it like that? What's the reasons for cultural scholars to have different understanding on fandom? And it makes sense. The criticism makes sense, but I will also point out that the avoidance on media psychology, on parasocial relationship, also impact negatively on the cultural analysis of fandom. And I will actually argue that we need some psychological studies and psychological elements in the analysis of fandom. And this can be done firstly by explaining to all of you, parasocial relationship is normal. Let me define parasocial relationship a little bit more. It means a type of mediated relationship. It is one-sided for most of the time and it's imaginative. It stays in your mind. So this is parasocial relationship, but it's actually totally normal. And then I will talk about, while in cultural analysis of fandom, beyond the strength of relationship, we also ask more questions. We ask about cultural meanings of the fandom activity. So let's see why cultural scholars of fandom really hate the concept of parasocial relationship and why they stay away from media psychology. This is because in this field where over media representation, we often portrait fans like this, a scandalous portrait of them. Firstly, they are the hysterical crowd. You see a group of young teenager girls standing in the concert screaming and crying at their idol. If they are boys, they might be participating in soccer game. They are super crazy and totally lose their mind. So a hysterical crowd. And then you see another image about fandom. That is the obsessed loner. Some of you mentioned the word obsessed. So the obsessed loner who is definitely having something wrong in his mind, he likes a celebrity, but he stops the celebrity. He intrudes into that person's life. This guy, for instance, this guy was stalking Taylor Swift for more than six months and he climbed onto the wall outside of her house and throw stones onto the wall. And one of my colleagues told me that he slept on Taylor's bed, but not with her, but when Taylor was not there. So you see a very obsessed loner representation. So you see an intense fantasy with the celebrity and it develops into certain behavior like stalking or even killing the celebrity. So you see the news a lot. But culture scholars will argue that fans do much more things than these two type of behavior. More than screaming, more than crying, more than stalking, most of the fans don't do stalk a celebrity. So here the argument is that if you see a person stalking a celebrity, is he a fan? Is it because of fandom relationship? Or is it because there is already some predictor of psychological condition that contributes to the stalking behavior? So don't put the scapegoat on fandom. This is the argument from culture scholars. And they try to explain where does this two stereotype come from? Why do we often think fans are so fanatic? Fan, fandom, the word fan, is an abbreviation of fanatic, okay? And the scholar actually try to explain, well, actually these two image, these two imagery about fans is actually over cultural imagery and assumption about modernity. So alienation, atomization, vulnerability and irrationality are the major concerns that people have towards modern life. So this goes back to the history, to the last century, at the transition of the century. And we were talking about industrialization, urbanization, secularization and individualization. All the social transformations bring the change on people's lives. For instance, all the old cultural authorities that used to grant people cultural identities are actually losing control on individuals. For instance, church. Church does not actually give a lot of definition on individual life anymore in modern life. Your family, your kinship structure, we began to see young people are migrated from rural areas to urban centers. They become a worker in the factory. So they are living their family. All those important authorities in the early 20th century, they used to give cultural identity on people are losing hands. And then we began to be worried about modern life. So this obsessed loner is actually a depiction on our concern on the alienated and at-messed man. And historical crowd is about the vulnerable and irrational victim of mass persuasion. Again, the history is early 20th century. That is the moment we began to see the emergence of mass media. Newspaper, popular press, radio, film and later television. We began to be reacting towards certain concerns on the persuasive function of mass media. And one of the history about academia is that a lot of earlier work on sociology and communication research was actually responding to certain concerns about this transformation of our societies in the best. For instance, you see this book. This book actually still have a lot of purchase in popular discourse nowadays. It's called The Crowd, a Study of the Popular Mind. So it's a sort of analysis on a group of people or on mass society when they go in together, when they are emerged themselves in the crowd, they lose their own individual mind. They began to go along with the crowd behavior. And in cultural scholars' idea, this type of arguments were portrayed is actually a social, cultural and political reaction on the transformation of societies. It's political because in this book, in this book, the crowd is described as the working class. So the crowd, the mass society, the group of people who often lose their mind were the working class. And you can see this is actually a political reaction on the changing social structure. So that's why cultural scholars are saying, well, it's actually these two images are not accurate representation of fans. They are projecting the anxiety onto our concerns of modernity. And second point, why cultural scholars don't like parasocial relationship? So here, let's talk about is parasocial relationship normal or not? Will be there some danger, right? So in this book chapter, Parasocial Interaction, Parasocial Relationship and Well-Being, the scholar actually mentioned, indeed, there are some dangers about parasocial relationship. So it will happen when it develops into dysfunctional, meaning that your parasocial relationship, your imaginative relationship with a media figure become the dominant part of your world. And it excludes you from entering into the real social relationship. You don't make friends anymore. You totally immerge yourself into the imaginative world. That might be problematic. Secondly, when PSR become delusional, delusion is different from imaginative. Delusion means that you can't make a distinction between reality and virtuality anymore. You think that imagination really exists. You really think Taylor Swift likes you. So this is delusional disorder. So these are some of the pathological concerns about parasocial relationship. But in mass media or in popular discourse, we often see a misreading on the pathological concern of it. It's always like fandom activity is dangerous. If you practice too much, it leads to psychological problem. So in this type of argument, you actually see a slippery slope type of arguments. It means that parasocial relationship will grow into pathology. But we don't actually have evidence in this aspect. So it's about different scales, but it's not about growing into pathology. The second part is, I'm talking about parasocial relationship. I didn't talk about fandom. Fandom and parasocial relationship are totally two different concepts. Parasocial relationship is a type of relationship, but fandom can be an identity, can be the practice of identification, can be a different type of fandom activities, and of course it has psychological aspect. So parasocial relationship, well, it's not the eco of fandom. And that is why I'm going to show you this chart here. We have a lot of parasocial relationship studies, but fans PSR with celebrity, it's only one small part of it. Some of you asked, can people develop this imaginative relationship with other figures? For instance, people may have the PSR with fictional figures in novel. In literary study, parasocial relationship with a role, with a figure in the novel in the fiction, it's also part of the study. So fans PSR with celebrity, it's small part of it. And secondly, when we do parasocial relationship research, where do we find the participants? For most of the time, for the sake of representativeness, we sample a representative, a random sample. So they are audience, we ask them, imagine that you have a star that you really like. So they are audience of a star of a influencer, but they are not fans. We didn't go to a fan club to ask them. So these are the different starting point of fandom research or PSR research. This is a lovely research. So the scholars are interested in whether participation in fandom activity will have certain effect on PSR. And this research is very special because indeed they invite participants who identify themselves as certain type of fan. And they ask them to do the fandom activity that you normally do, then they try to see whether it adds onto PSR or not. The result is you see growth of PSR, but it's not significant. It does not really add onto PSR. But there are two discussions that is actually very interesting. So after this survey, they actually interviewed the fans. And the fans are saying, I actually made real friends in the fandom community that I participate. Even though the star I like, it's mediated, but I actually made best friends forever in the fandom community. Saying that it means by participating in fandom activity, there are possibilities of real social relationships. This is first discussion. The second discussion is the participants said, but when I talk about my relationship, my love towards Taylor Swift, my friends does not understand it. My friend in my real life cannot understand my esotericism in fandom. So you see this a lot. And this is the moment how you are going to make certain implication or certain discussion in your study. And the scholar here actually said, well, we may be cautious because this is a sign to show that this person's love in the celebrity is not accepted in that person's social surrounding. It might be developing into a scenario. It exclude that person into real social relationship. But I would say this really depends on how you think about social relationship. Why do you think your love towards Taylor Swift should be understood by your classmates here, right? Why do you think the people who are surrounding you should be all have shared the same interest, same cultural background, same religious and political orientation with you? If we are thinking about that as social relationship, we are having a really old understanding on what social relationship means. But in today's world, we are constantly involving into different groups, the group of interest. We have classmates. We have friends from your sports center. We have friends from your other activities. We constantly drawn into different type of communities. So think about this, joining into real social relationship, what does it mean, right? So this is some of the discussions from this paper. If I say PSR does not equal to fandom, what does fandom mean? Here, we actually have a descriptive definition on fandom from Henry Jenkins. So one of the foundational scholar in the research of fandom activity. And he said, it's a particular mode of reception. And this mode is the way that you consume media text. And it's special because oftentimes fans are consuming the media text in a really intensive and identifying way. You read it for several times. You watch it for several times so that you can recite it. And you can't stop talking about it. This is the meme. There will be one day I stop talking about the fan object. There will be one day I stop talking about Taylor Swift, but it's not there. So you do it repetitively. It's a set of critical interpretive practices. So fans are interpreting the text in the really playful, speculative, subjective details and they pay attention to the undeveloped potentials. So they read the text for so many times and they identify the potentials to develop further. So repetition and imagination are key to the fandom practices. And this might be a point where we see different things with psychologists. In psychology or certain version of psychology, if you are doing things repetitively, if you are having too much imagination, that's a moment, a sign of, ah, is it normal or not? But in culture scholars, they think it's normal because fans are doing that for pleasure. And fandom is also a form of cultural production. You not only consume the text, you do something with it. For instance, you use memes from the fiction that you are waiting to say something about your everyday life. This is how our students are doing group project. 99% of the job will always stand by one person. Fans are actually try to express their everyday life with their fan object. And it's a base for consumer activism. So this is an example. For instance, fans are protesting against the industry. Protesting against the entertainment industry. They don't want their shows to be canceled or they don't like how certain character is portrayed in their game. So they are protesting. So fans are having agency. They know what they are doing. In the end, it's a form of social community. It's actually a place where we can bring people together. So it's social. You can see that Helen Jenkins spent a lot of efforts to debunk the stereotypes. They write fans in a super, super positive way. It's participative agent and a lot of participation, but it's also weird. Because Helen Jenkins in his book in 1992 didn't mention even one word about celebrity. And this type of positive fan, agentive fan is actually another positive stereotype that we see a lot in today's culture viewed. Fans are always positive. It's always productive. This actually leads to a very weird scenario. In the cultural analysis of fandom, most of the people are talking about fans of a piece of text. You like certain fan fiction. You like certain novel. You like certain, well, maybe music, but it's never or seldom about celebrity fandom. Celebrity fandom only accounts to small part of cultural analysis of fandom. This is exactly because scholars can't avoid psychology anymore when they talk about celebrity fandom. They can't portray a positive image anymore when they are thinking it's a audience relationship with certain celebrity. And that person might be influenced by the celebrity. So we run into actually a difficult scenario. It is because of the avoidance of psychology that actually leads to certain black spots in the cultural analysis of fandom. As students and scholars, we should do something to it. So this is, maybe we can do something here. In PSR study, we have fans PSR with celebrity, in celebrity fandom, we also need to understand what is the mechanism, what is the motivation that leads fans to do something to participate in the community. This can be done, firstly, the message is parasocial relationship is actually normal. My question is, if you have certainly a crush on someone in this classroom, what are you going to do? You're going to keep it to yourself, lament for the rest of your life, what are you going to do? Yes? Maybe lady first, tell a friend about it, right? Yeah, to share it. Yeah, you look over to them, you're observing that person. Yeah, pay attention to that person, right? Pay attention to that. Not yet stalking. You imagine about certain things. How about I invite that person for lunch on campus? What is that person thinking about me if I really approach that person? So this means that in social relationship, there are certain elements about imagination, right? We also think about a person in mind. So this means imagination exists in social relationship. Then why do we say parasocial relationship is different if imagination is also there? Secondly, if you're saying mediated relationship, mediated relationships are locked in today's digital world. If you have a partner that is not living in the Netherlands, you are maintaining a long distance relationship, there are imaginations going on. You are thinking about that person, what is that person doing right now that subperson already have lunch? You are imagining. And thirdly, if we're talking about how self is constructed, self is constructed by how other people is imagining you and you are also imagining how you look like in that person's mind. So self is constructed in a recursive way where imagination play an important part. And in the end, we share the PSR with a friend. Just like our friend said, I will talk about it with my best friend. And this is actually the message in the title of my talk today, Taylor Swift and my BFF. We can see your parasocial relationship with the star can be an important part for you to build real friendship with other people. So just talk about PSR is normal. Let's see an example of one of the bachelor thesis we are doing in cultural studies department. And the student was analyzing different type of discourses and browners on social media that is actually about celebrities. So the student actually finds three type of discourse. The first one is real person fan fiction. For instance, the fan fiction depicting romantic relationship between Taylor and Travis. So it hits different this time. It's Travis that different compared to the other formal ex-boyfriend. But if you're saying it's different this time, it means that the fan who is writing the fan fiction really understand the celebrity image. The fan really know the history of Taylor. That is why the fan was playing some imagination and create a fan fiction. I assume all of you know what is real person fan fiction, right? You are writing a fan fiction based on a celebrity character, a real character. Another type of discourse online we see a lot is actually gossip. So gossip means certain type of speculation. Sarah just also mentioned about it. We gossip about the antagonism between celebrities. And in gossip, we see some perceived evidence from the media industry. When we see something is going on there, based on that perceived evidence, you do some speculation there. For instance, some fans think while there might be something going on in the relationship of these two people, they might be breaking up. And in the end, we also see a booming type of discourse and that is tarot card reading for celebrities. If you see while there are some evidence showing up there, you go to a tarot card reader, you ask the tarot card reader on YouTube, can you do a reading for the couple here? And our student tried to analyze what's the difference between the three type of discourse because they look similar, they look interrelated, but also different. And we actually see that real person fan fiction is about imagining, right? You know it's not real, but it's fun, it's pleasure, it's enjoyable to imagine about the celebrity world. And of course your imagination is not coming from nowhere. Your imagination actually come from the celebrity persona. We know while something is going on with their relationship, while the tailor was not very successful or smooth in the previous relationship, this time is different, so you have certain imagination there. And gossip is about speculation. Based on certain perceived evidence, you try to speculate. Sometimes public discourse are saying gossip is weird, it's stupid, but actually fans who do gossip have really got a lot of knowledge in the industry. They know the tips, they know the tricks in the entertainment industry. And in the end we have tarot card reading, it's about prediction. It's about prediction, but based on certain template of supernatural things, based on certain spiritual things. And of course it's not only tarot card, you are asking it because you see some gossip, you know the celebrity image. So these three type of discourses are actually intertactual and interrelated. But what is the role of parasocial relationship here? It's not about the stress of relationship. So the students interviewed the people who are participating in this type of activities and the audience where the participants are saying by doing that it make our relationship with the celebrity alive. When you feel the attachment, when you feel the urge to imagine about the celebrity, you want to do something, you want to practice something. If you like Taylor Swift, you want to imagining about her, you're not going to lie on your bed and close your eyes and do nothing and only with your mind doing something. You are going to practice something and by participating into this type of tarot practices, it keeps their PSR alive. It's a way to maintain it. So this is a small research that students has done. And let's try to see what fandom culture can do actually beyond PSR. Let's firstly try to see some of the communication science work that is done onto PSR. So normally we are thinking about what leads to PSR, what predicts PSR. And for instance, we have this construct perceived similarity. You think that star is the same type of person with you. And if you have this perception, it may lead to the PSR. Or sometimes the attributes of the star. So you think that star is physically attractive, it can lead to PSR. If you think that person is socially attractive, it leads to PSR. So these are some of the antecedents of PSR. And of course what happens after PSR. So the outcome of PSR, Sarah has just explained influence. Social influence is a type of outcome of PSR. So this is normally how we are analyzing PSR in communication science. But I have some questions to our audiences here that is actually coming from cultural study perspectives. That is beyond PSR. For instance, what type of person is Taylor Swift? Fans or audiences? Fans, non-fans, anti-fans. You can all answer this question. Yes? And she got cancer and she already died. So she did a lot of this kind of things to her fans. So she is kind and considerate, right? Yeah, considerate, kind, show hope to people. Other understanding? Yes? The first one is because you never know why they're doing something like that. But what is the image? What do you see on media? I mean, I'm not talking about the real Taylor Swift, but the Taylor Swift on media. It's changing. I think she just wants to consider a nice and self-made person. Yeah, self-made. Yeah, self-made hard worker. Yes, some positive, some negative, right? But do you see the change of her star image? Previously, she was like this girl next door. Now she's hardworking or maybe also talented and also very expressive at certain political issues. So if we are asking this type of question in cultural study, we are actually doing analysis on the star image. We are trying to analyze how this person is presented by the entertainment media, presented by herself, but importantly, presented by fans. What do you like about her, right? Our fans actually like about her considerateness. What other people like about her? Probably that she reminds of someone, like somehow now talking or hearing about her, she can remind me of an on for me. So she's like big star, but also kind of close. Close. Yeah, to be very... She's a big star and a human. Yeah, yeah, yes. Relatable, right? A cat person. She's a good interpreter of similarity. Yes, yeah, yeah. So you can see this is actually the difference between disciplines. In communication study, you will answering whether you feel similar or not. But in cultural study, you are going to answer what do you mean by similar? What exactly is similar? Is it cat person, dog person? Is it about pet? Is it about considerable bonus? So we are asking the what question here? And question for our Chinese friends here. What is the nickname of Taylor Swift by Chinese fans? Yes, yeah, bad luck. So it's like bad luck. Whenever Chinese fans call her, it's about bad luck. Well, the word, the character is actually means moldy. So if you get molds on the ceiling, so why do people use mold as a name for a celebrity that they like? Have you ever thought about it? Big math times are hijacked by other, maybe anti-fans. Or maybe politically want to hijack her reputation. Yeah. So kind of bad luck, also her personal relationship. Yeah. You can see fans are actually explaining her life. So fans are actually very protective, right? So, well, it didn't turn out to be good because she is unlucky. Fans are finding a lot of reasons for the star and trying to protect the star and trying to explain why certain things worked out, why certain things not. So this actually shows a typical, I would say, I'm not sure whether that's typically Chinese or East Asia. Fans often project a motherly gaze onto the star. We are like mothers and we take care of our children and idols and celebrities are like the children that we should be taking care of. Not only support them, not only help them to achieve better career, but also protect them. So in cultural study, we try to analyze this type of practices in fandom culture, right? So that is why the cultural meanings of fandom activity beyond the strength of relationship. Okay, questions? Thank you. Anybody have questions for Mingyi? I have one question. I talked about my passion for Harry Styles. Am I even a fan? Do I even have a parasocial relationship or am I just overreacting? No, no. If you think you are a fan, then you are a fan. Okay. Fan is not measured by the scale, it's measured for most of the time by your identification of yourself. Yeah. Okay. Thank you. I think we're a little bit short on time, so if it's okay with you guys, we can do the panel session right now. Then we get both the speakers up on stage and you can ask questions. We have a small discussion. Is that... Guys, this is Hannah from Studium Generale. She's gonna lead the panel session. If you have any questions, just raise your hand. I'll come to you, I'll get you the mic. You don't have to scream. Okay? Take it away. All right, yeah. Thank you, Julius. Okay, first of all, thank you so much for your compelling and intriguing presentations. I think we've learned a lot in those 30 minutes lectures. I really want to keep most room for questions from the audience because I think you have a lot of them. But one question that I really had still in the head of my mind was what parasocial relationships will, what kind of influence they will have in the future. Also, it was briefly mentioned before with having relations with non-human objects. Maybe it also makes me think of AI, for example, or virtual humans, maybe, it becoming even more real as we go. What are your thoughts on that? Will we all be in many, will we all have many parasocial relationships in the future? Yeah, who wants to start? For instance, you may know about virtual idols. So the celebrities that is virtual and the celebrity can sing and dance, can perform in front of media. You can say there might be possibility for audience to have PSR wisdom, but you also need to think about what contributes to the performance of the virtual idols. For a lot of time, it's fans who are creating the audio, who are creating the image for that. So that idol, when the idol is totally made by fans from their hands, I assume or I predict it might be possible for PSR to emerge. But for an image that is created by the industry, by the producers, I don't know, I'm not sure. There are examples in China and it's totally flopped. So produced by the industry, by the government, and young people don't really like it. And Sarah? Yes, so parasocial relationship is something that was first investigated for traditional media. So we saw that people also had a parasocial relationship with soap characters and so on. So it's not new, right? But I can imagine that on social media, when you have the impression that you have real interaction with a person, that it can influence your bond. So with regard to the future, I think it will definitely something that will still be there, I think, like that imaginary relationship with people. So what Mingi said is like, maybe for some people also an escape that they can imagine about what their favorite influencer or celebrity would do in this situation. People will always need that, like reference figures, like role models they can look up to, they learn from those mechanisms that I also explained to my lecture. I think they will always be there, right? Although it will differ, of course, in which life phase you are, especially among young people, they learn a lot from those role models, like influencers and celebrities. So for them, it might be that those parasocial relationships are more important compared to in another life phase, like if you're like me, you're very busy with your professional life, with your family and so on. There might be not room for having a parasocial relationship or you also might not have the need for it because you can learn stuff, if you have the urge to learn something or to form your identification, you can learn from other role models as well. So it doesn't have to be those celebrities or social media influencers. And also one thing that's connected to it, you have this development going on with the metaphors that we are more and more also engaging in already, for example, in games like Roblox or Minecraft, I think you're shaping the world in a way. It's already kind of going in that direction. When you take that into account, when it comes to these parasocial relationships, yeah, how do you think that will look like also that we can maybe meet our celebrities there, like in not real but as if real in a virtual reality, what do you think that will do to us? Or will it change us? Or do you have any thoughts about that or? Yeah, I think in the future, we researchers might have to redefine the concept of parasocial relationship because if you can have a lot of interaction with a media figure or with an influencer or whatever you want to call him or her, is it still a parasocial relationship? Is it still one-sided? If there is a lot of interaction going on? So I think this is something that we are also struggling with in our research. If we talk about relationship with influencers and when you think about like those niche influencers that have a small followers base, are we still seeing there a parasocial relationship or is it some kind of relationship that is not para but real social because there is a lot of interaction going on? So I think with the future developments with regard to the metaverse and so on, I think we need to think about how we need to redefine this concept of parasocial relationship because it might not be para anymore. Exactly, like it will be a bit blurred, right? The line of where it's like still para or yeah. Yeah, I understand, that's interesting. And also one other question that I had, I think you mentioned it before with like Chinese fans taking on a particular perspective or in parasocial relationships, are there any other cultural differences or how culture influences how people view being in a para social relationship? Do you maybe have more examples of this? Yes, I do see there are cultural differences but it's not necessarily about Chinese culture or Western culture, it's more about industrial culture. So how the entertainment industries are doing there, how the entertainment atmosphere is doing there. For instance, we have a small study, testing audiences' parasocial relationship with influencers and also celebrities is the collaboration between me and also colleagues from communication department. What we find is that, well, the student actually have a lot of survey done in China and what we find that the perceived authenticity cannot predict PSR with influencers. So even though you find it's very authentic but this does not really correlate with the PSR, it's even a little bit reversed. Meaning that the more authentic you feel, the less PSR you have with that person. And my job was to write the discussion part of the paper to explain what is happening. And my suggestion is to show the production culture of influencer nowadays in different parts of the world because you have so many type of influencers. A lot of them might be having the job of showing certain performance that it's super sensational, super humorous, it's not really about their personal life. So their culture production or their content of influence is not too much based on their personal life. It's about performance, it's about acting, it's about certain creativity. In that aspect, is authenticity still a thing there? So maybe the production culture is a thing that we need to think about. Yeah, yeah. Okay, thank you for answering these questions. I think we can go to the room now, through the audience, to receive any questions that you may still have. Yeah, I was just wondering because the interpretation that you gave of parasocial relationships, I found it quite neutral, but I am wondering what kind of effect does it have on a person's mental wellbeing because that person is basically imagining features of that person that this person may not really have. A person is basically investing a lot of time in something that is, it doesn't really have a foundation because it's imaginary and even if you see videos or texts of someone online, I don't think you can ever really imagine how this person is in real life. If you actually know someone or if you're really someone's friend, then I think it's completely different than how someone appears online. So I can imagine that it doesn't really have a good effect on someone's wellbeing because they spend so much time on it. And it's actually something that's indented. And even if people start fighting each other online because someone says something negative about this celebrity, then I don't know. In my opinion, it's quite, I would look at it as something that's quite problematic. I don't find it that problematic, but I must say that it can be related to problematic behavior, that the parasocial relationship can be for some people in certain condition, a determinant of problematic behavior. For instance, if the relationship is so strong that they are refraining from other social contexts, like offline social connections and so on, then it's indeed problematic behavior. But I do think that that is only true for some people with certain characteristics in certain situations. So I would be very careful in labeling it to parasocial relationship as good or bad. I think it depends on so many other characteristics, including the personality of the person who has a personal relationship or environmental factors, situational factors, things that are going on in your life and so on. We call that there is no universal media effect. In communication study, it's not about PSR leads to certain psychological condition. You will see other moderators. For instance, this person's psychological status and psychological features, personality features are actually moderators. If that person have more of that attachment type or psychological feature, that person is more prone to have certain problems with PSR. So it's not about universal effect. Can you name examples of, do you know like what? The attachment types, which type of attachment? Like the attachment styles or, yeah, okay. Maybe Sarah knows much more psychological. Yeah, there can be many different things. It's very hard to give a profile of the person for who the parasocial relationship would be bad. I think it's very difficult. That's why I can't really give an answer to that question, actually. And also because there's not that much research about it. And for everything, indeed like Mingi said, we should think about parasocial relationship, not as a magic bullet effect, like that it affects everyone in the same way. It's different for different people in different situations. But actually there's not that much research on it, I think. So I don't have the answer, no? Yeah. Okay, so students, if you're interested, maybe for your future, it would be something interesting to look into. Is he questioning in the back? I just wanted to comment that I really enjoyed both presentations and there was one comment made that actually, when you're in a long distance relationship, the relationship all the thrives on imagination, which I found very, very interesting. So I feel like in every relationship, there might also be this element of imagination that makes the actual relationship thrive, right? Yeah. Yeah, do you have any? Yeah, actually, that's just a comment, just a realization that I had. So thank you. Thank you. So I have a question. So after hearing your lectures, now I'm wondering whether parosocial relationship and limerence are similar or different from each other, in a sense that limerence is mostly romantic. Once I did romantic relationship, but do they differ or are these terms quite similar or how would you define them compared to each other? The difference between PSR and what? Yeah, limerence. Limerence, yeah. Prelimerence. Limerence, well, it's... Limerence, it's... Well, I cannot give you a proper definition, but it's also about having thoughts about someone and then you form a romantic relationship which is in your mind and then being quite obsessed with someone. It seems that there are some similarities. The imagination is there, but mediated is not there. PSR was developed in the age of mass media about mass media figures on media and then if you say there are... Well, a difference might also be, I would say, social status because PSR, if that person is a media figure, that person might be actually quite high on social status. So your imagination about that figure, it's coming from a big, big person in the society. Thank you. Can religion sometimes be seen as a parasocial relationship? Is it different from media, parasocial relationships? I think so. If PSR was invented as a construct, at that time, it will be, yeah. I can imagine somebody thinking, what would Jesus do? Well, there are... There were actually in 16th century, in 16th century, there was a woman was writing some more stories about Jesus and Maria. So the stories that is not in the Bible and that person, a believer, was writing about what other stories can be there. And she was, well, killed for that because people think you are totally crazy. But if you put it into today's society, she will be on wet pad for that. It's a fan fiction, right? Like a Bible fan fiction or something. I saw some questions in the front here as well. Yes. Thank you. So this idea that parasocial relationships, they kind of exist in a similar but different way to normal, regular relationships, was very interesting to me. And the first thing that I thought of was, well, over the years, the amount of friends that you have, or regular relationships that you have kind of consolidated, they kind of become smaller because you either find out the imperfections in people or inconveniences and so on and so forth. So do you think there's some special quality about parasocial relationships that makes them last longer or shorter? Are they more or less permanent? Are you blind to imperfections maybe? What are your thoughts on that? I think because of digital media, it's more possible for you to retain all kinds of social relationships even though that's mediated. We have this description on social networks. Previously, for instance, without Facebook, without all those digital media, you graduate from primary school then you may not have a lot of chance to communicate with them anymore. But now they are on your Facebook, they are on your social media, so you are still keeping a sort of distant relationship with them. You are bringing all those social relationships with them along with your social media. So your social networks are expanding but the density of it might become, let's say not that dense anymore, but you keep it as a mediated type of relationship with them. Go for social network analysis, you will find the answer more. Yeah. So the thing with social media is it's also opened up our abilities to interact with people a lot more and it's not completely uncommon that sometimes even celebrities interact with their fans through social media. I was added to Tom Felton's Instagram Live like in 2020 and I had a whole conversation with him and for me as a normal person, it's something I still talk about four years later because it was a big deal. He will have no idea who I am if you ask him. How do you think these interactions affect parasocial relationships people have because I don't have one with Tom Felton but I'm assuming that if I did it would have some sort of effect with me like, oh my God, he knows who I am, something like that. So I just wanna know what you think about it. Yeah. Oh yeah, I think it will definitely influence the bond, the connection that you feel with that person, right? If you feel that that person made time for you, like that person who's so busy, who was such a high status, so much power and so on, made some time for you to communicate with you, I can imagine that it definitely fools or makes stronger the relationship. Yeah, I don't have much to add on that but I don't know. In fandom culture, in fandom culture we call that showing recognition publicly. So the star is showing the recognition upon this fan publicly in front of other fans and this will lift up the fan status of that person drastically and I can assume that definitely there might be stronger PSR there and celebrities in China or in East Asia popular culture, they do that constantly so they will announce that today I'm going to the fandom fan page, I will pick up someone randomly to answer your questions. Please come to my fan page at eight o'clock this evening. So they actually stage that event. So from a producer's side, I think they may realize it contributes to more PSR among the fandom, yeah. I also know of these big K-pop bands, I think they even have their own apps or something and then you can like chat with your favorite group members or something like that, but you have to pay for it. You have to pay for it. Yeah, yeah, that's interesting. There's also already a long time, question here in the front. Yeah. Yeah, so we talked a bit about parasocial relationships with real people. We touched shortly upon relationships with imaginary or fictive characters. What about virtual YouTubers? So people who have this character or sprite of themselves that moves along, but it is not really them. How does that affect parasocial relationships and also would it, we touched a bit about cyberbullying, would that make them more likely to be cyberbullied or less because it might be a bit dehumanized, but also make it maybe, yeah, it does make it easier or harder for people. And you mean like a real person or, yeah. Yeah, so it's a real person, but on screen it appears as a drawn character that moves along and like the lip move. Yeah. So your question was whether we can also have a parasocial relationship with that person? Yeah, and does it make more, it like easier to have a parasocial relationship or harder and how does it also affect the likelihood of cyberbullying? Yeah. I think, yes, that people can have a parasocial relationship with that figure, but we know that the presence of human characteristics is quite important so that you perceive the figure as somebody who is experiencing the same things as you are experiencing in life. So for like an animation figure, it's sometimes very hard to imagine that that the figure is also going through a breakup or is having a hard time while studying and so on and so on. And then with regard to cyberbullying, I'm not sure actually. It's, I never thought of that, of comparing like whether there would be a difference between like a real human social media influencer versus like some figure or whether, probably both negative comments and feedback and so on. But yeah, it's difficult to say more about it because I don't know. And I don't think it started before. So now you have a unique thesis topic. I already did my thesis. But because, no, I was thinking about it because like, I think it's very unlikely people bully fictive characters or like anime characters. Huh, yeah. I don't know, I've never looked into that actually. Although there is like, I don't know if you would call it a bullying or just negative critique that they receive, right? To call it bullying, there should be like an intention to hurt the character and it might be a bit strange, right? If it's like, not a real person, then yeah, you know that you cannot hurt that character, right? So I don't think we can use the label cyberbullying then. We might can say that, yeah, indeed negative critiquing that there is like a lot of negative comments. Towards that character, but I don't think that I would use the label cyberbullying or harassment or anything like that. Yeah, because there's not the intention to hurt. I will use the word anti-fandom. If you criticize that fan object, if you hate the fan object, we'll call that anti-fandom. But then there are lots of reasons, contributes to anti-fandom. I think we have to end it there because it's five. So we have to get some drinks now at Café Esplanade, also really important. Yeah, really, if you have some questions, maybe you can come. Oh, really? Let's answer that. I cannot see. Okay. Is it okay for you? One last question then. Well, we've talked about the fence themselves, but do you think the influencers, the civil liberties can abuse, misuse, overuse the relationships? Like they are aware that they have relationships, so do they sometimes abuse it? Well, I think they definitely will use that when they pitch themselves to a large company for like a big deal, a sponsorship deal. They will probably use that. Like I have so many followers and I have close connections with many of them. I think it's... Yeah, I also think that they are really aware of that and that in some way they sometimes will use it to get some benefits or get some deals done, I think. Yeah. I think I have two answers here. Well, firstly, in lots of scenario, if the fans are doing something online, you see conflict and antagonism. If the celebrity does not say anything, that is actually a blame on the celebrity because you didn't solve the problem. So you didn't actually, you are silent. You didn't pay public responsibility to solve the fan conflicts. Secondly, from the insider information of participating, doing ethnography work in fandom community, the fan leaders, the big fans are always in collaboration and in contact with the public relations of the celebrity. So it's not like fans are totally the other side outward, another word of the celebrity team. Fans can be collaborating with the celebrity team in certain entertainment environments. Yeah, we call that professional fans. You are doing the fan job for profession, yeah. Thank you for the last question. Julius, I would like to give the floor to you to wrap it up with some closing words. Thank you for all the questions. I think I went up and down the stairs 15 times, so that was great. Thank you also for attending. Thank you to Mingyi and Sarah for telling us about personal relationship and about two different viewpoints and about fan culture. When you exit, you will be given a coin and you can get a drink with that in Esplanade. There will also be some snacks, so please enjoy them. Thank you, Hannah, by the way, for helping organizing it. And if you ever want to visit an activity like this, please visit either the Flow website or Stream Generale website as we both organize activities, both formal, informal, cultural, and academic. So, yeah, thank you.