"People want a" In summary, aspiration scales very well. In more detail: You're very close to correct. People want to pretend or aspire that they could get

"People want a" In summary, aspiration scales very well. In more detail: You're very close to correct. People want to pretend or aspire that they could get into a twitter conversation with their favorite actor or whoever. Less than 1 in a hundred thousand viewers do, of course. Its similar to my grandparents generation sending physical postal fan mail to pretend they could have, I donno, one of the Beetles maybe, as a penpal, but nobody actually had a relationship like that. They just want to feel cozy that they could, if they want. Fanmail in 1960s IS twitter in 2010s. In that way I'm not seeing any problem with simulating that on enormously larger scale legacy TV. TV has cratered such that popular show in my parents generation meant 1 in 3 americans watched an episode of MASH, now legendary ratings mean roughly 1 in 30 Americans watch Survivor and all of them can feel cozy that they could have a personal relationship, well, as personal as twitter gets anyway, with Jeff Probst if they wanted, although statistically rounding down to zero none of them want to actually tweet him. Yes its easier in theory to talk to a guy with 1e3 viewers than a guy with 1e7 viewers, but since people are cozy because of the feeling they could if they wanted to, they never actually do it on a statistical basis. Maybe rephrased its infinitely more important that Lady Gaga respond to "a" fan's tweet, so all her fans can feel they're that one lucky fan, than to have Lady Gaga respond to a fixed fraction of her total fanbase. How about phrasing it like "The now mandatory use of social media for a famous person scales to a very small fixed constant number regardless of the number of fans".