Studying Celebrity Practices on Twitter Using a Framework for Measuring Media Richness

Social media enables the performative actions needed for celebrities to build and maintain audiences. Platforms like Twitter mediate identity construction and interaction with fans while enabling environments that are co-constructed by celebrities, fans, and the platform itself. We use the theoretical lens of media richness to study the ways that different types of celebrities enact “micro-celebrity” by mapping three richness dimensions (contextual, interactional, and informational) into groupings of Twitter’s affordances. Utilizing crowdsourcing and regression analysis, we systematically weigh each affordance and generate richness scores for each dimension, for each tweet. Using these richness scores, we find that performance of different types of celebrity requires different affordance mixtures, and that these mixtures reflect differences in the environments within which celebrities operate. Our research contributes to work at the intersection of Twitter affordances and celebrity studies in new media, and provides a framework for generating richness scores.