Regarding the Happiness of Celebrities: The Follower Terror on Social Network Sites

Abstract

In her book titled Regarding the Pain of Others, Susan Sontag (2003) touches on “compassion fatigue” which is created by the individual’s look at the images of war and violence. The twenty-first century has been a century in which the bombardment of not only negative images but also positive images has been undergone on social network sites. The active use of social network sites has created a psychology of communication pertaining to the digital age. Byung-Chul Han discusses the violence created by the state of “excessive positivity” within the scope of neuronal illnesses such as “depression”, “burnout syndrome”, and “attention deficit”. The violence of positivity emerges with the distancelessness which has increased in the process of “excessive communication” on social network sites working on performance basis such as Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and YouTube. This distancelessness reveals its aggressive face in the communication between the celebrities who share posts about their lives on social network sites and their followers who comment on these posts. With social network sites, the word “fan” has been replaced by the word “follower”. The personal spheres of the celebrities who exhibit their private lives of their own accord on social media to a great mass of followers whose number reaches millions have become open to followers’ interferences. Based on Han’s neuronal violence hypothesis, this holistic multiple-case study analyses the “follower terror” that celebrities who use social network sites as a part of their show business are exposed to. The communication between the celebrities who have been selected through deviant case sampling and their followers results in a two-sided tiredness. On one side, the celebrities whose personal spheres are under constant interference suffer tiredness; and on the other side, the followers who follow the lives of celebrities in all details and make comparisons with their own lives suffer tiredness as well.