Taylor, 16

“I’m a BELIBER…you don’t know what that is do you? Oh my gosh!”

        Taylor, age 16, spends 70 percent of her day online tweeting her ‘friends’ about Justin Bieber. For those of us unaware, Justin Bieber is a 16 year-old phenomenon much like Usher, Justin Timberlake, Joey McIntyre, or Donnie Walberg; he is the object of nearly 6.5 million peoples obsession. His followers call themselves “Beliebers” I’ve been told, the word “Belieber” is, in the true fashion of this generation, a mash-up of “Believe + Bieber.” I currently follow Taylor and can safely say she is absolutely one of the biggest Justin Bieber fanatics I have ever encountered.

Taylor’s “twesties,” her Twitter best friends, do not know her in her everyday life, they only know her as an online body that tweets nearly 300 times a day about Justin Bieber. She stays connected from her iPod Touch using wi-fi at school and friends house to tweet and trend topics—during our interview she explained that a “trended topic” connects her fellow “Beliebers” to each other. She spends hours “Favorite-ing” people, accessing the latest videos, downloads and communicating; she is completely unaware that her tweets are absolutely public, and absolutely being watched (and rightfully so) by record labels. During our interview she boasted that, “Island Records follows me!” When I asked her who Island Records is, knowing full well that it is an enormous record label responsible for Justin Bieber, Bon Jovi, Melissa Etheridge and other huge artists, she looked puzzled. “I don’t know, but they follow me,” she gushed. I showed her the link to their website, their featured artists, and even other artists she may not know about but all she could connect was that “Justin Bieber’s boss knows her.”

I find her choice of phrase interesting, “Justin Bieber’s boss knows her.” It is my experience that relationships formed online are better left online, so I probed, “Who are the people you tweet to?” Her answer was somewhat surprising, “My friends, my best friends, my twesties,” which she clarified are different from her real life best friends. It seems that this online community has spawned a new form of friendship in which peoples with mutual interest share their admiration for that interest using a maximum 140 characters. Her life online is simply another connection to similar people.