A glamorous but highly stressful job: The role of social media-afforded status in micro-celebrity stress coping

Anqi Hu, Ruizhi Yuan, Ruolan Chen and Martin J. Liu

Technological Forecasting and Social Change, 2024, vol. 209, issue C

Abstract: Social media has produced a new breed of celebrity—the micro-celebrity—who achieves excellence by promoting themself and engaging in audience communication. Based on social media affordance theory, our study explores how micro-celebrities cope with the stress caused by their status. Semi-structured interviews and observations are used as an interpretive paradigm with a comprehensive sample of 22 micro-celebrities and three managers and their presence in the live streaming industry in China. The findings show that: micro-celebrity status triggers role stress, and, in turn, role stress reinforces micro-celebrity status; and empty self and trans-parasocial interactions are two approaches that can be used to cope with role stress. The contribution made is threefold. Firstly, our study expands micro-celebrity literature by identifying the facets of their social media-afforded status in the context of live streaming in China. Secondly, our study contributes role theory by exploring three facets of micro-celebrity's role stress in live streaming in China. Thirdly, our study proposes that a micro-celebrity's stress, is a social phenomenon and its recognition helps our understanding of actively self- and socially-related coping approaches. We also provide managerial implications to better understand the micro-celebrity stress phenomenon and corresponding coping approaches.

Keywords: Social media affordance; micro-celebrity; Role stress; Stress coping; Trans-parasocial interaction; Empty self (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2024
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0040162524005894
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:tefoso:v:209:y:2024:i:c:s0040162524005894

DOI: 10.1016/j.techfore.2024.123791

Access Statistics for this article

Technological Forecasting and Social Change is currently edited by Fred Phillips

More articles in Technological Forecasting and Social Change from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().