Oh yeah--I mean, not personally...
It is 
anatsuno's birthday today! Here is some pseudopsychosociological noodling, because anat enjoys that sort of thing.
There's an interesting concept called Dunbar's number, more commonly known to most denizens of the internet as the Monkeysphere, although readers of that article should keep in mind that its purpose is to amuse rather than to provide useful or accurate information. Dunbar's number is the theoretical number of people with whom it is possible for one person to maintain stable relationships. Most of us "know" around one or two hundred people; beyond that, it's hard to devote the necessary effort and attention to developing well-rounded mental pictures of who people are.
My monkeysphere includes my family, my coworkers, and my friends (a group that encompasses several people I've never met in meatspace). It also includes Amanda Palmer, Ron Weasley, and a nonexistent fictionalized representation of a douchebucket of a hockey player named Patrick Kane.
Amanda Palmer is fairly easy to conceptualize as a member of my monkeysphere. She's a celebrity, someone with a public presence who puts a lot of herself out there. I think it's fair to say that most people have at least a few unidirectional relationships like this in their monkeyspheres. Fannish folks, in general, know how to maintain healthy one-sided relationships. There are a few people who get creepy and stalkery (or believe they really do have a personal relationship with a celebrity--those relationships really are One Directional, ho ho ho), but most of us understand that we are not in, e.g., Tom Hardy's monkeysphere. He may love and appreciate all of his fans, but he doesn't have the neurological processing power to know them.
I wouldn't actually call myself a fan of Amanda Palmer without specifying any caveats. But I know her, or at least her public persona. I'm familiar with her creative history, her voice, her style of self-presentation, her public opinions, and some of her mannerisms. I have a pretty good idea of the sort of thing she'd be likely to do. And so do other people. I'm just about as likely to strike up a conversation with a stranger at a party based on our mutual familiarity with someone like Amanda Palmer as I am to initiate a conversation by asking how the other person knows the party's host. Quite often, people form friendships based on mutual acquaintances, and those mutual acquaintances don't have to know us back to serve that social role.
They don't actually have to exist, either. If a character is developed enough to be conceptualized as a person, they can serve that same role as mutual acquaintance. One of my closest friendships as a teenager began when I was standing around in a group talking about movies and made an offhand comment about how Captain Jack Sparrow and Will Turner were MFEO and needed to bang already (this was the kind of thing I said loudly in social situations at the age of thirteen) and a new girl who had been quiet up until then exploded in agreement, and we spent the next three hours gossiping about the personal lives of fictional pirates.
The characters we employ in our interactions as mutual acquaintances not only don't have to be real, they don't even have to be canon. I have spent a total of literally days, possibly even weeks if you add it all up, discussing fanon Ryan Ross with
verbyna over IM. The person we were talking about was based on a real person, but only loosely, as evidenced by the existence of "canon!Ryro" as a standard term in our vocabulary. Similarly, I know there are many friendships out there that were originally based on squee and analysis of complex fanon versions of Inception characters whose personalities barely even got screen time.
We are people who love stories, who love sharing excitement, and we connect with each other not only by finding the characters our lives have in common but also by creating them. We build mutual relationships off of unidirectional relationships, and both kinds of relationships strengthen and grow and change in the process. This is so cool to me.
This entry was originally posted at http://jedusaur.dreamwidth.org/69895.html.
anatsuno's birthday today! Here is some pseudopsychosociological noodling, because anat enjoys that sort of thing.
There's an interesting concept called Dunbar's number, more commonly known to most denizens of the internet as the Monkeysphere, although readers of that article should keep in mind that its purpose is to amuse rather than to provide useful or accurate information. Dunbar's number is the theoretical number of people with whom it is possible for one person to maintain stable relationships. Most of us "know" around one or two hundred people; beyond that, it's hard to devote the necessary effort and attention to developing well-rounded mental pictures of who people are.
My monkeysphere includes my family, my coworkers, and my friends (a group that encompasses several people I've never met in meatspace). It also includes Amanda Palmer, Ron Weasley, and a nonexistent fictionalized representation of a douchebucket of a hockey player named Patrick Kane.
Amanda Palmer is fairly easy to conceptualize as a member of my monkeysphere. She's a celebrity, someone with a public presence who puts a lot of herself out there. I think it's fair to say that most people have at least a few unidirectional relationships like this in their monkeyspheres. Fannish folks, in general, know how to maintain healthy one-sided relationships. There are a few people who get creepy and stalkery (or believe they really do have a personal relationship with a celebrity--those relationships really are One Directional, ho ho ho), but most of us understand that we are not in, e.g., Tom Hardy's monkeysphere. He may love and appreciate all of his fans, but he doesn't have the neurological processing power to know them.
I wouldn't actually call myself a fan of Amanda Palmer without specifying any caveats. But I know her, or at least her public persona. I'm familiar with her creative history, her voice, her style of self-presentation, her public opinions, and some of her mannerisms. I have a pretty good idea of the sort of thing she'd be likely to do. And so do other people. I'm just about as likely to strike up a conversation with a stranger at a party based on our mutual familiarity with someone like Amanda Palmer as I am to initiate a conversation by asking how the other person knows the party's host. Quite often, people form friendships based on mutual acquaintances, and those mutual acquaintances don't have to know us back to serve that social role.
They don't actually have to exist, either. If a character is developed enough to be conceptualized as a person, they can serve that same role as mutual acquaintance. One of my closest friendships as a teenager began when I was standing around in a group talking about movies and made an offhand comment about how Captain Jack Sparrow and Will Turner were MFEO and needed to bang already (this was the kind of thing I said loudly in social situations at the age of thirteen) and a new girl who had been quiet up until then exploded in agreement, and we spent the next three hours gossiping about the personal lives of fictional pirates.
The characters we employ in our interactions as mutual acquaintances not only don't have to be real, they don't even have to be canon. I have spent a total of literally days, possibly even weeks if you add it all up, discussing fanon Ryan Ross with
verbyna over IM. The person we were talking about was based on a real person, but only loosely, as evidenced by the existence of "canon!Ryro" as a standard term in our vocabulary. Similarly, I know there are many friendships out there that were originally based on squee and analysis of complex fanon versions of Inception characters whose personalities barely even got screen time.
We are people who love stories, who love sharing excitement, and we connect with each other not only by finding the characters our lives have in common but also by creating them. We build mutual relationships off of unidirectional relationships, and both kinds of relationships strengthen and grow and change in the process. This is so cool to me.
This entry was originally posted at http://jedusaur.dreamwidth.org/69895.html.