Celebrities and Microcelebrities in Quarantine: Strategies of Parasocial Communication

Abstract

The research applies the relationship strategies and the image repair strategies frameworks to study and compare celebrities and microcelebrities’ communicative activity on social media during the lockdown in the USA and the UK in spring, 2020. For celebrities, the sample collected on social media in March – April, 2020, reveals qualitative changes: in the quarantine, first-rank celebrities attempted to reduce the assumed gap between themselves and their fans by using the strategies typically associated with microcelebrities, namely openness, positivity, task sharing, and assurance. If applied inappropriately, these strategies damaged the celebrities’ image and the famous chose either to take corrective actions or to ignore the communication failure. The microcelebrities’ messages during the lockdown did not show any qualitative shift: they held on to their typical openness, assurance and task sharing relationship maintenance strategies. Yet, the posts, where some microcelebrities, pursuing the openness strategy, sincerely reported their neglect of the quarantine restrictions, were more destructive to their image than similar posts from celebrities. The negative feedback affected microcelebrities communication on social media quantitatively and qualitatively: the number of messages dropped and the bloggers employed an extensive set of strategies to repair their image. Received: 3 June 2021 / Accepted: 26 July 2021 / Published: 5 September 2021