Scholars and the general public have taken notice of the transformations and tensions in fan (and audience) cultures. Inspired by Crystal Abidin’s conceptual framework of internet celebrity, we will turn our attention to the audiences addressed, invoked and imagined by these microcelebrity practitioners, and this will enable us to outline three main types of young audiences – the “fans,” the “followers” and the “anti-fans” – of microcelebrities. Combining ideas from well-established theories and theoretical concepts (e.g. en/decoding in reception analysis, para-social relationships, structuration theory) and our own findings from different empirical audience research enables us to explore a variety of ways in which young audiences relate and engage with the microcelebrity-generated content that is omnipresent in today’s youth’s routine media repertoire.

The episode is based on this academic publication:
Murumaa-Mengel, M., & Siibak, A. (2020). From Fans to Followers to Anti-Fans: Young Online Audiences of Microcelebrities. In Reimagining Communication: Meaning (pp. 228-245). Routledge.