The Psychological Burden of a Massive Social Media Audience
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What psychological burdens come with a massive social media audience?
Explore your deepest desires if you dare. The Last Show with David Cooper. So you wanted to go viral on social media. Does that sound fun to you? Well, it turns out a million followers might come with a million tiny emotional hurdles. There is some psychological trouble that can come with internet fame.
How does viral fame affect influencers emotionally?
And if it happens to you, your biggest fans might be your biggest stressors. I am here with someone who's worked on this research area. She's a management and organizations professor at NYU Stern, and her name is Juliana Pillemer. Juliana, welcome to the show.
Thanks so much for having me.
So I think being an influencer and having a loyal and huge following sounds great to most people. Like life will be easy when that happens.
What is audience entanglement and how does it impact creators?
Is that kind of the assumption going in here?
Yeah, you know, I think both in the research that we looked at and just like common knowledge, right? It's sort of like go viral. You've made it. That's the, you know, gold at the end of the rainbow and you sail off into the sunset. And we found that that really isn't the case. Spoiler alert. So I can go into that more about what that means.
Please do. And I want to talk a little bit about how influencers and Internet celebrities, they can kind of be entangled with their audience or their following. So tell me about it.
Why do creators experience a crisis of meaning after going viral?
Yeah, so we actually set out to do, you know, we didn't go in, this research that I did is inductive. So what that means is a nerdy word for saying, we didn't go in with a hypothesis. We started interviewing these creators. We were actually just really curious about their creative process. And we ended up discovering sort of this phenomenon that we called audience entanglement. The name comes from quantum entanglement. None of us are physicists, so please don't check us on like the actual science of what quantum entanglement is. But the idea is that despite being sort of separated by large distances, these creators felt this sort of intense interdependence and interrelatedness with this like imagined audience.
to the point that it became this sort of constant consideration in the work they were producing. So after many of them went viral, they felt this like initial high, and then it was kind of came crashing down and experienced this sense of initially what we call dysfunctional entanglement, which was a really sort of miserable state. They used terms like crumpled up ball of paper, chamber of despair to describe how they felt overwhelmed. kind of at the peak of their success. So we were really actually surprised and shocked by this.
What are the emotional effects of trying to please an audience?
This was not something we anticipated going in. And then it kind of became the crux of our study.
Now, do most people who are in this state of being internet famous, being successful creators, is having a massive following kind of like the finish line for them? And before they get there, do they think if they just amass the following, they'll have this happily ever after kind of effect?
I think they do. I mean, we look at, for example, like Mr. Beast, one of the most successful creators, right? And so many of his videos now are targeted at helping people get to this state, right? And he says absolutely nothing about, okay, you have a million people then who are watching your every move and reacting to your every post, right? What do you do then? Similarly, in my world, right, in studying creativity and how we can make people more creative and motivated at work, right, this idea of having a product, a service, or just you being super successful is kind of treated as the dependent variable, right, this endpoint. And so we knew very little about, okay, once you get widespread appeal, once you attain that audience,
what happens. And so, yeah, that is kind of the default. And so both in sort of the real world and then in the research world, we knew very little about what happens at this point.
So tell me more about this entanglement.
How do influencers manage their relationship with audience feedback?
What do these creators think of their audience? What control does the audience have over them? What is sort of the emotional and psychological effect of always trying to please that audience?
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Chapters
8 chapters
1
What psychological burdens come with a massive social media audience?
0:01–0:21
2
How does viral fame affect influencers emotionally?
0:21–0:45
3
What is audience entanglement and how does it impact creators?
0:45–1:15
4
Why do creators experience a crisis of meaning after going viral?
1:15–2:22
5
What are the emotional effects of trying to please an audience?
2:22–3:35
6
How do influencers manage their relationship with audience feedback?
3:35–4:11
7
What strategies can creators use to cope with audience expectations?
4:11–4:40
8
What is the irony behind seeking internet fame for happiness?
4:40–10:33
Speakers
3 identifiedMore from The Last Show with David Cooper
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