Research Article
A Study on Fans’ Consumption Behavior from the Perspective of Parasocial Interaction Theory: The Psychological Motives and Behavioral Logic of “Paying to Support”
Abstract
Mid-century’s PSI-paradigm, once grafted onto the media-audience interface, now subtends an asym-intimacied alterity. The fan-economy’s vertiginous swell re-codes the old schema: motives, no longer traceable to face-kinship, migrate into spend-support gestures whose surplus-value exceeds any utilitarian quotient. Sifting the archive, this essay tri-angulates—motive-stratum, act-profile, scene-index—so that PSR-driven outlays (emotive, emblematic, compensatory) emerge as a palimpsest beneath which the commodity itself is but a vestigial tail. Instances show: what is purchased is less object than relation-residue.
Keywords: Parasocial-interactioning; PSR-fan Nexus; Affect-economy
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