Through a Glass, Darkly: The Dynamics of Fan‐Celebrity Encounters

Abstract

Mass media influence interaction in important ways: fans of serial television use mass media to incorporate the fictional and the extraordinary into their real, ordinary, everyday lives. Using ethnographic and interview data, this article examines the activities through which certain fans seek face‐to‐face encounters with the celebrities they admire and how this intersection of the ordinary with the extraordinary creates problems of interpretation that fans attempt to solve. Fans make and take advantage of opportunities for prestaged encounters at official public appearances by their favorite actors. Some fans may also encounter their favorite celebrities by chance in the course of their daily rounds in “celebrity sightings,” or unstaged encounters. Certain fans, however, actively pursue actors, deliberately seeking them out and creating fan‐staged encounters. These efforts produce a distinctive interactional tension in which pursuing fans recognize the similarities between their behavior and that of “celebrity stalkers” and attempt to differentiate themselves from the stalkers celebrities fear. This article analyzes these interactions as a step toward a theory of fan‐celebrity interaction.

Meeting Josh Groban (Again): Fan/Celebrity Contact as Ordinary Behavior

“…The fan as "stalker" is an almost iconic symbol in media (Duffett 2013), fed by popular films such as Play Misty for Me as well as real-life incidents like the murder of John Lennon by Mark David Chapman or the more recent murder of The Voice star, Christina Grimmie, by Kevin Loibl. Studies have been devoted to the stalker (Ferris 2001(Ferris , 2004(Ferris , 2005 but the vast majority of people who participate in any media fandom do not match this profile. One important distinction is to separate ordinary approach behavior from invasive staking behavior.…”

Fan Behavior and Lifespan Development Theory: Explaining Para-social and Social Attachment to Celebrities

“…While extensive research has been conducted in areas like social psychology (Giles 2000(Giles , 2002, sociology (Adams and Sardellio 2000;Ferris 2001), mass communication (Rubin and Step 2000;Rubin and McHugh 1987), popular culture (Sandvoss 2005;Harrington and Bielby 1995), and anthropology (Caughey 1984), only limited research has examined fans and their relationships with celebrities in the developmental literature. When psychologists study fan behavior, they tend to emphasize the pathological end of the spectrum of fan behavior with very little being said about average people who engage in parasocial and social attachments to celebrities (Dietz et al 1991;Maltby et al 2006).…”

Close encounters: Ritualizing proximity in the age of celebrity. An ethnographic analysis of meet-and-greets with Dutch singer Marco Borsato

“…This emphasis on the normalness and down-to-earth qualities of a celebrity ('he must also go to the toilet!') seems much less usual among fans of, for example, celebrities from America (Ferris, 2001(Ferris, , 2004Gamson, 1994) or Asia (Chow and De Kloet, 2008). Furthermore, as it has been pointed out, the appreciation of these down-toearth qualities can be linked to the more general celebration of ordinariness in Dutch society at large.…”