Kim Kardashian’s twitter and Pope Francis’s twitter are the complete polar opposites. On one hand, the Pope tweets nothing but holy sayings and inspirational quotes. He doesn’t use his twitter to promote himself, unlike Kim Kardashian. She post pictures of her modeling, pictures of her outfits that she is wearing that day, and pictures of her and her husband, Kanye West. Kim uses twitter as a place to post pictures and comment about them. She does it everyday. The pope posts to twitter every few days and all of his post are sayings about religion or they are inspirational quotes.
When we asked people around campus on how they follow these celebrities, we got some interesting, but expected answers and results. Nobody that we interviewed, followed both Kim Kardashian and Pope Francis. It was either one or the other. Not many of the males that we interviewed followed either one. Austin Boileau, freshmen, says he follows Kim Kardashian just because “he wants to see how stupid her posts are.” Robbie Murray, freshmen, follows her because she is attractive. However, most females that we interviewed follow her. They all had the same answer in why and that was because they wanted to see her style and outfits. On the other hand, we only found two people out of about twenty who follow the Pope. Perry Zipoli follows him because he likes to “keep updated on what the Pope is doing.” This is a problem because the Pope doesn’t use twitter to update his life. Mathew Mullins says he follows the Pope to “gain knowledge from him.” As we expected, there was a big difference in the reasons why people follow these two celebrities.
We also used these people about their connections with their favorite celebrities. Most of the people we asked this to were males, so they talked about sports players who play on their favorite local teams. They have a positive connection with these players because of where they play and how good they are on their local team. When we asked them what draws them to these players most of them talked about whether they are really good players, funny on their social media platforms, or are just support charities that they themselves also support. Most of their favorite celebrities were local heroes in their towns or just large social media icons, like Kanye West, who have a huge following around the globe. The next question that we proposed to the individuals that we interviewed was, how do they stay connected with their favorite celebrities? The most common response we received was that they follow them on twitter to stay updated with their daily lives. Twitter offers them the ability to see what these celebrities are up to all of the time, where they are, and who they are hanging out with. It allows them to feel as though they are present with the celebrities all of the time. The next social media platform that they said they followed their favorite celebrities on was Instagram. Instagram allows them to follow different celebrities and visually see what they are doing each day and to have a sneak peak into their lives. Instagram offers them a unique way for them to connect with each celebrity on a more personal level and it allows them to have a much more personal connection with someone they may never have the chance to meet in person.
Visionary Loyola by CS118.1/CM203.1 Messina 