Ktdav

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Hello, Ktdav, and welcome to Wikipedia! My name is Ian and I work with Wiki Education; I help support students who are editing as part of a class assignment.

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If you have any questions, please don't hesitate to contact me on my talk page. Ian (Wiki Ed) (talk) 19:15, 28 August 2020 (UTC)

Parasocial Relationships Peer Review

Hi Ktdav! I reviewed your article for our peer review assignment and here are my thoughts.

Overall, very well done. The original article didn't have many sections and tended to block everything together. I think you did good at expanded the general background information of the accredited founders and breaking up the larger section on social media into smaller and more detailed sections. Doing this gives the article more clarity and also will give readers an idea of what kind of topics to look into next if they want more information.

I like how you made a section for the rise of social media influencers, but I don't think it's very clear how they tie into the larger topic of parasocial relationships. You mentioned the different levels of influences like mega and micro, and for many small influencers interaction is how they grow their following so it makes it hard to understand how that would tie into one-sided relationships. I'd also suggest just adding into the lead that parasocial relationships can occur with real world people as well as fictitious characters because it isn't clear with the examples you provide there. One of the other questions on the review was about if the article represents underrepresented groups or marginalized communities. I'm not sure if this would fit into what you're going for, but a lot of the time information is presented in ways that cover the Western world, and I know that East Asia has seen an increase in super fans both globally and at home with the increase of Idol Groups, so much so that they have special word for super fans (in South Korea they are called sasaeng and some Japanese Otaku might fall under the role as well). Mentioning those words and phenomena would be a good way to bring in a more well-rounded view and might make it easier to find some more sources on the topic of parasocial relationships.

The most important thing though would be making it clear how social media influencers fit into parasocial relationships by reaching past just a description of social media influencers.

For some sources, here's one I found on the super fans in Korea that may give way to other parasocial relationship tie ins Iwicka, R. (2018). Every Breath You Take: Sasaeng Fans. At the Interface / Probing the Boundaries, 99, 125–147. https://search-ebscohost-com.libdata.lib.ua.edu/login.aspx?direct=true&db=cms&AN=129395847&site=ehost-live&scope=site

This is an article I found that provides a lot of statistics and draws conclusions about trends with parasocial relationships over the past 60 years that may come in handy to reference when talking about the uptake of parasocial relationships. Liebers, N., & Schramm, H. (2019). Parasocial Interactions and Relationships with Media Characters-An Inventory of 60 Years of Research. Communication Research Trends, 38(2), 4–31. https://search-ebscohost-com.libdata.lib.ua.edu/login.aspx?direct=true&db=cms&AN=136815043&site=ehost-live&scope=site

I hope this helps! I'll be back on in a bit to make my suggestions to your sandbox page Theorizethis (talk) 23:32, 7 October 2020 (UTC)

Per our peer review assignment, I've gone into you sandbox draft and left some suggestions for changes! I've left my suggestions in bold and some of my reasonings for things like deleting a sentence or phrase I've left as invisible comments. Let me know if you can't see those and I'll go back in and write the comments in bold under the paragraph.

Theorizethis (talk) 02:38, 8 October 2020 (UTC)

Instructor Feedback for Draft

Overall, you have done a nice job of revising the existing article in terms of the lead and background and by adding new sections about social media I think you are making some nice contributions. Here are few suggestions for improvement as you revise. The lead section is good, but you might want to add a citation or two to support your definition of parasocial relationships. In the background section, I'm not sure parasocial relationships can be called a "theory," rather it seems more like a "concept" to me. I think you can clarify the communication versus psychology perspectives a bit more in the background. This distinction seemed muddled to me. The paragraph that starts with "today parasocial relationships are more prevalent than ever..." could be moved down to the social media influence section. Instead the background should provide a little bit more about how the study of parasocial relationships has evolved since the initial conceptualization by Horton and Wohl. This sentence needs a citation to support it: "Media users grow to depend on these persona. They plan to interact with them, count on them much like a close friend, create memories that involve them and believe they know the persona better than others." Also making claims about how often parasocial relationships happen or how common they might be needs support from a source. In the social media influence section the background about the forms of communication is not necessary, especially because parasocial relationships cannot occur face-to-face. The celebrity endorsement section is good, but needs a source to support this content. I like the section on influencers, but I think there could be some more direct connections to how followers develop parasocial relationships with influencers. It's possible that I might think an influencer is cool and want to have what they have, but don't really feel any sense of emotional connection with them. Other people however, might have a strong affinity with an influencer and thus appear more like a parasocial relationship. I appreciate the attempt to explain parasocial relationships with theory, but I am not convinced that attachment theory is the best fit for understanding parasocial relationships. You are welcome to keep it, but you will need a stronger argument with support from sources to be more convincing. URT makes more sense as a theoretical connection. On a note about completing the assignment, I figured out that the italicized font was copied from the existing article and the regular font was your writing. However, this was not consistently applied as there were multiple instances of regular font that was copied from the existing page. This mad it difficult to know what writing was yours and what was from the existing article. This needs to be clarified and accurate. This was a great start and I think with some refining and fine-tuning it will make for great contributions to the existing article. Jrpederson (talk) 20:00, 14 October 2020 (UTC)