In 2009, Lawrence Kutner, a character on television's House, M.D., unexpectedly committed suicide. A Facebook memorial group was created shortly thereafter in memory of the fictional character. A thematic analysis of fan postings on Kutner's Facebook memorial page revealed evidence of people experiencing parasocial grief as they displayed emotional expressions of grief, reminisced, and advocated for Kutner. Through thematic analysis, we discovered that elements of parasocial relationships, particularly parasocial breakups, were apparent as the members posted evidence of their grief over the loss of a television character. Moreover, this parasocial grief is likely to be disenfranchised, as the death of a television character is typically not recognized by others as a legitimate loss. This study also highlighted the role of social media as an outlet for grief as well as revealed confusion between fiction and reality resulting from social media.
This paper examines avatar gender choice within a competitive avatar use context in which avatar gender is not equivalent across avatar functions. In data from the game League of Legends (N = 15,392) reflecting over 5 million avatar gender choices, women were found to have stronger preferences for avatar gender consistency than men. Further, women tended to choose female avatars at twice the available rate offered by the game, while men chose male avatars at a rate approximately the same as the proportion offered. These findings support the argument that women experience more pressure than men do to perform their gender identities overtly, even in competitive games where avatar choice is mostly functional and avatar gender is fixed within specific characters. A practical implication is that by offering a wider range of female avatar and character options, game designers could likely attract greater female audiences without significant loss of male players.
The COVID-19 pandemic led people worldwide to increase their use of media. Twitch, a livestreaming platform best known for video games, saw massive viewership growth in March 2020. This study collected and analyzed chatlogs from before the pandemic and during the pandemic. These analyses tested for 2 of the fundamental motivations of uses and gratifications theory (i.e., social integrative and tension release) within general and targeted chat messages. A targeted chat message is a message in which the sender has tagged another user. Social integrative was tested by analyzing the number of unique users and the number of messages. Tension release was tested by examining the chat messages for the expression of sentiment. Though we did not identify any change in the number of chatters, chatters did increase their number of messages. The increase in chat messages supports the use of Twitch as a method for addressing social integrative needs. We also found an increase in expressions of sentiment and emotion for general messages. Expressions of sentiment and emotion were infrequent for targeted messages and no variance in streamer targeted messages. These findings support the use of Twitch to meet tension release needs but suggest that chatters would rather release with an intended target.
Public Policy Relevance StatementTwitch.tv presents a unique platform in which content creators with millions of followers interact live with their fans. Furthermore, the content on the platform is always diverse enough for nearly anyone to find a community of interest. Therefore, Twitch served as a unique media platform during the pandemic that connected users directly to celebrities and fans with similar interests at a time in which connecting with others was especially difficult.
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