"'A true fan': Celebrity obsession in the age of Twitter 0 Comments 13 April 2014 Celebrity obsessions have existed forever, from The Beatles to Elvis. But these days, obsessions may be developing into dangerous, all-consuming lifestyles detrimental to young people's physical, mental and social health. These obsessions are expressed in "fandoms", communities of people, usually found on the internet, who all share a love for a particular person, TV show, artist or band, or any number of other things. Two 17-year-old girls from Melbourne's inner east sat down with The Under Age to discuss their involvement in a number of fandoms, including those of One Direction, Little Mix, Cher Lloyd, Justin Bieber and Ariana Grande. False names have been used for the girls, who asked for their identities to be withheld from publication as they believe that some of the information shared, could result in ostracism from the rest of their community. Jesy and Jade consider themselves to be now somewhat removed from the internet worlds that used to control their lives. 12 months ago, it was a very different situation. Both of these girls have similar stories, and they both ended up in a dangerous place of social isolation, sleep deprivation and irrationality. For Jesy, her involvement in internet fandoms began when she discovered Justin Bieber. Developing a 'school girl crush' on him, she was told by a friend that if she got a Twitter account, she could contact him. Every day, Jesy would rush home from school just in time to be online for the time each day when he started following his fans' accounts. With her love for Justin Bieber, Twitter opened up a whole new world for Jesy. She joined the fandom and was immediately connected with fans around the world. From the Justin Bieber fandom, she learned of the boy band One Direction and that led to joining their community, and then she learned of the band Little Mix, and the obsessions seemed to snowball from there. Twi

"he problems with online dating It is clear that online dating has at least two problems. First, it is an opposite of face-to -face interaction. Second, it does not help heal the emotional pains of some online daters. Online dating is a category-based, rather than an interaction-based process. In the category-based process, one uses some concepts to predict both possibilities of acceptance and rejection by the others. It is an artificial type because both rejection and acceptance by the daters are not about the rejection and acceptance of real persons, but of the imagined or perceived attributes of their categories. People never fall in love with categories (even eHarmony's use of personality traits as the basis of matching does not represent real diverse human experiences and characteristics), because only real interpersonal process can create the feeling of love. Love is created and maintained by the process of meaningful communications (including validating accurate perceptions and invalidating inaccurate perceptions of interpersonal reality). Online dating cannot do so. Additionally, love is highly individualistically based. One loves another person because the Mr. Right or Ms. Right is unique individual in one's eyes. I make a distinction between online communications and online dating/matching. New computer technology has greatly expanded people's potential and freedom to communicate with one another, some of which may generate love and romantic relationships, but online dating/matching, at least in its current format, has restricted the freedom.  "