Celebrity Twitter Talk
Stephen Fry, Britney Spears and Sarah Brown will figure in a new study by Dr Ruth Page of the School of English, into the uses of social media.
Dr Page is writing a book called Stories and Social Media – Identities and Interaction which will be published next year.
The research has highlighted how celebrities construct identities for their online personas. The initial linguistic evidence, analysing 15,000 tweets by 30 of the most popular celebrity tweeters, has already revealed certain mechanisms through which celebrities use Twitter to create an illusion of immediacy and proximity with their audience.
Dr Page suggests that while tweeting seems to give fans privileged access to the celebrities, it also amplifies the celebrities’ professional status.
Dr Page said: “Telling stories is a human impulse. Through social media, millions of people are telling their own stories every day in status updates, tweets and blogs. Social media is a phenomenon of our time so it is important to make sense of it. It magnifies social interactions and can tell us a lot about ourselves and how our relationships function.”
