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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Jer" data-source="post: 8666094" data-attributes="member: 19857">Just as an FYI - participation trophies have been around at least since the 70s and complaints about participation trophies ruining the youth of today have been around since at least the 80s if not before.And honestly the "weird apologies" have nothing to do with anything like that.  What's really changed is that the world is fully connected through social media and people have parasocial relationships to celebrities in ways that are more public than they were before.  So where in the past your friend group would either ostracize a bad actor or demand that they apologize and shape up, in a parasocial relationship the dynamics are all screwed up.  When people are demanding "weird apologies" what is happening is that celebrities have slotted into the "friend or acquaintance" place in folk's psyches without actually being a friend and they are reacting as they would if a friend had done something - ostracizing or demanding they apologize and shape up.  Except in parasocial relationships the dynamics aren't between equals - you have the celebrity on the one side and the mob of fans who have that person slotted into the "friend" place in their brain on the other.  It's not a healthy dynamic, and if anything it's evidence of people being more and more isolated from real communities and looking for something to fill that psychological role in their brains.  Social media makes it even worse because social media "celebrities" are at the same level as everyone else in your feed and feeds into that delusion that they're actually your friends and not people you have a commercial relationship with.</blockquote>

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