First, let me say that I think it is great that Taylor Swift finally got married. Any time a beautiful and successful woman marries a handsome man and makes the institution of marriage look glamorous, it is a win for American culture.
That said, I was alarmed by reports that bags of trash collected outside her wedding were being sold online for $100 apiece. Apparently, some people are so obsessed with Swift that even garbage can be sanctified as long as it was recently adjacent to Tay-Tay.
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Even more surprising was a recent study published in the journal Psychology of Popular Media, finding that somewhere between 20% and 30% of college students self-identify as “stans” — a term that originated as a combination of “stalker” and “fan.”
The surveys, conducted first among X users and then among Instagram and Facebook users, found that these self-identified stans spend an average of about two hours a day online not only sharing and seeking out news about their celebrity obsessions, but also organizing events and even raising money for “social justice” causes.
“I was surprised by the sheer prevalence of self-identified stans,” social psychology and health professor Tara Marshall told PsyPost. “This is hardly a fringe group of young people, but rather a sizable minority.”
Two hours a day is a lot of time to spend online in total, let alone on a single person you do not even know. Research shows that adolescents who spend more than an hour on social media every day are more likely to be unhappy and to exhibit suicide risk factors such as depression, suicidal ideation, or a history of suicide attempts.
Young women, particularly young liberal women, are more likely to be unhappy and suffer from depression than their more conservative and male counterparts. And guess what?
The Psychology of Popular Media study found that stans are overwhelmingly female and liberal.
Traveling across the Pacific, observers have noted that Japan’s total fertility rate largely tracked America’s for decades, until the early 1980s. At that point, the expansion of satellite television helped fuel the growth of Japanese celebrity “idol culture,” which closely resembles the stan culture of today.
“Japanese idol culture includes secrecy around romantic and family life and cultivates parasocial relationships with fans, establishing cultural leaders who do not showcase family life,” the Institute for Family Studies’ Peter Foreshaw Brookes notes. “This might explain why Japanese fertility diverged from the West and fell so early.”
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Spending two hours a day obsessing over someone you have never met and will never spend any real time with cannot be good for your love life, especially if everyone you interact with online is the same sex as you.
It could leave you so depressed that you might find yourself buying someone else’s trash.
