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

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.