The Popular Crowd By Jake Halpern Summary

The World of Make Believe In “The Popular Crowd”, Jake Halpern explains how people have become lonelier and created para-social relationships with celebrities to deal with the rise in lonliness. In the essay, Halpern shows how the percentages of people have living alone has doubled. To cope with a lack of personal relationships they make up relationships with celebrities instead of relationships with people around them. The focuses of his essay are how people cope with being lonely and how this causes them to create relationships with celebrities. Halpern uses many studies and surveys to show how this has affected people living alone. Halpern says, People nowadays have become less social with each other. They are now living alone instead of …show more content…
Jacki Fitzpatrick led one with the Texas Tech University. The study asked college students to participate in a survey containing many psychological measures, some that calculated para-social and romantic relationships. These surveys showed that as interest in a parasocial relationship increased, interest in a romantic relationship decreased. Halpern quoted Fitzpatrick and McCourt conclusion, “‘It makes sense that individuals may use para-social relationships as on way to fulfill desires or address needs that are unmet in their romances.’” (225). The people who felt accepted and were not lonely usually did not have imaginary relationships with celebrities, whereas those who felt unaccepted did develop para-social relationships (Halpern 225). According to Halpern, all of these different test and topics all lead to one thing. That people who are alone most of the time and who are not accepted, tend to create pretend relationships with celebrities. To say the least, people who are not accepted and lonely just long to be in with the popular