Celebrities-both those who are famous offline and those who are famous because of their online presence, micro-celebrities have 80,000 followers online according to Marwick & boyd (To See and Be Seen: Celebrity Practice on Twitter, 2011, pp. 139-158).
http://www.tiara.org/blog/wp-content/uploads/2011/07/marwick_boyd_to_see_and_be_seen.pdf
George,
You make an excellent point. I think you are on point in the idea of EDUCATING the younger generations about the pros and cons, so many are only focused on the benefits that they forget the negative aspects.
mostly fantasies. Then phylosophical, social awareness, personal joy, vicarious pleasuer, grievances, current affairs, vent out, relating things,religious and political orientation and identical views. sometimes insecurity and more of privacy conscious
Having celebrities weighing in on advanced scientific research like they understand what is going on can have disastrous consequences. Just look at Jenny McCarthy and the whole vaccination "argument" going on. This unfortunately forces us in the community to stop the work we are doing to counter the false claims by such people distracting us from actually doing the work that needs to be done. Furthermore the more bad ideas stick around the deeper the problem gets with possible funding sources being "attacked" as a way to stop scientific progress. In short, since social media isn't going away anytime soon, we need people who have communication skills and can understand scientific "jargon" to man the wall and shoot down these erroneous claims.
Thank you, Hadwin. You bring up excellent points!
Thank you, Gerrie. You also brought up some excellent concepts to the table.
I'm interested in focusing my research on celebrities and their influence on their followers.
As mentioned above, there's no guarantees that celebrities will advance the public health cause; but they can. Their primary advantage, I'd say, is to draw attention to the issue and make it "cool". I'm a fan.
Dear Mari,
this is a very interesting research question. From an empirical viewpoint it would of course be optimal to gauge a better idea of those persuasion effects by running proper experiments.
And I think it would be feasible to convince some celebrities to run experiments with their Twitter or Facebook account.
This paper by La Ferrara et al. is about a different but close issue, i.e. the influence of Brasilian TV soap operas (where typically local celebrities appear) on fertility decisions.
https://www.aeaweb.org/articles.php?doi=10.1257/app.4.4.1
Hope it might help
Riccardo
In Germany, we have a few celebrities on Youtube who are very influencial especially on the younger generation. Very interesting is, that some of them do not intend to influence follower´s meaning about products, their goal is to support the political education. Here we have a role model for the tradional media, which often do not reach those audiences with their messages.
Look on youtube e.g. for "LeFLoid", he has 2.7 million subscribers ... And he had already interviewed our chancellor Angela Merkel.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5OemiOryt3c
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