Parasocial Relationships

A few days ago I was involved in a side discussion, when a friend of mine posted a tweet about creatives and the expectations that we place upon them. You can view the entire thread here if you so choose, but since then I have been mulling over some of the ideas. We find ourselves in this weird time where for so many of us our primary contact with other human beings is through our computer and the internet in general. Because of this often times a lot of lines blur in more significant ways than would normally be the case.

There is concept I was introduced to awhile back called a “Parasocial Relationship”. Pulled from the Wiki article, here is a brief description.

The terms parasocial interactions and parasocial relationships were coined by anthropologist Donald Horton and sociologist R. Richard Wohl in 1956, laying the foundation for the topic within the field of communication studies. Originating from psychology, parasocial phenomena comes from a wide range of scientific backgrounds and methodological approaches. The study of parasocial relationships has increased with the growth of mass and social media such as Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram, particularly by those investigating advertising effectiveness and journalism. Horton and Wohl have stated that television personas offer the media user a sense of intimacy and have influence over them by using their appearance and gesture in a way that is seen as being engaging, directly addressing the audience, and conversing with them in a friendly and personal manner. By viewing media personas regularly and feeling a sense of trust with the persona, parasocial relationships offer the media user a continuous relationship that intensifies.

Wikipedia entry on Parasocial Relationships

One of the challenges at hand I believe is that we are not wired as human beings to deal with people that we become invested in on the internet as being different from those who we might become connected to in person. This has been a significant challenge for me personally over the years because I grew up during the early age of the internet. I met my wife through an IRC Channel and even though we grew up thirty minutes apart, we were introduced by someone living in Belgium. I’ve developed life long friendships with so many people that I have played games with and more than one of them have become employees.

At the very beginning of this post I referred to Eve as one of my friends. We have been “friendly” for years and were originally connected through mutual friends on Google Plus. While we somewhat frequently interact online, I cannot with any certainty assume that she also considers me to be a friend. This is where our brains come into the equation, because there is a feeling of personal investment in the interaction. The interaction seems no different than that of someone you have known for years and are hanging out on a Zoom call with, than a long sequence of random hit and miss communications. So the challenge is that a false sense of intimacy can develop, and I don’t mean that word in the romantic sense.

In the case of this blog, you as my readers know a lot about my life. However the details that have been shared with you have been filtered carefully to sift out any information that I feel might be harmful to share. As a result if you mostly know me through this blog you have a specific image of me that I have more or less cultivated throughout the years. The challenge is in many cases this is a one sided conversation that we are having. I am writing into the void targeting no one specifically and it is up to personal interpretation how my words are taken. Based on your own personal experience something I might say might land with specificity that was never directly intended.

This is Simone Giertz, and she is a YouTuber that makes a lot of really interesting creations. If you have not seen any of her content then you absolutely should because she builds a lot of interesting machines. I’ve been watching her content for several years at this point and the way in which she delivers it is extremely personal. When I first started watching her she lived in a house boat, and over the course of the years I have been privy to a sequence of events in her life. The problem is… I don’t know Simone Giertz and she most definitely does not know me. The human brain however has a hard time of interpreting this data, and regardless of intent I care about her existence as a human being. So when shared her battle with cancer, my brain interpreted that stimulus as though a friend had cancer.

Essentially like I said before I think we were not wired to exist in this weird awkward middle ground. We are pretty good at distinguishing fiction from reality when dealing with a movie, or at least most people are. We are also pretty good at understanding what the social norms are when dealing with a person we know in real life and are sitting across the table from. What is progressively more confusing is this middle ground where we have been granted access to someone else’s life, without them ever having or even desiring any access to ours. I think we are still in the process of building the emotional and mental templates for how exactly this sort of interaction is supposed to work.

I think this reaction becomes all the more blurry when you encounter something like Twitch. With YouTube you are given a neatly edited view of someone else. It might feel intimate but there is the understanding but it is easier to tell that something is being produced and as such filtered for your viewing into short tight chunks of content. In the case of streaming however you spend a significant amount of time just hanging out with another human being while being shown a view of their world. You are given a chat box that allows you to have input into the experience making it feel two sided.

The problem of course however is that streaming is a performative act, and that effectively the person on the other side of the connection is putting on a show. However the successful streamers seem to be the ones that can sell the illusion of friendship. That is not to say that friendships do not develop over hours of shared interaction, but it is not exactly a level playing field. Those watching the stream have way more data about the person streaming than the other way around. I personally find Twitch to be a real challenge because I am not really invested in the act of watching someone else do something. As a result I only tend to watch the streams of those I already consider to be friends.

And with that once again we come full circle. A lot of those folks that I consider to be “friends” and people that I met through the larger twitter gaming community. Like I said above, that I have no proof that any of them consider me to be their friend, and as such I do my best to temper my own expectations of any form of reciprocation of those interactions. Our brains are really bad at this, and when it goes really bad it can lead to toxicity or even worse. I feel like a lot of the challenges that we have going forward is figuring out how to clearly outline what is and is not socially acceptable behavior in these middle spaces.

So many of the really horrible interactions I have seen between fans of something and the creators of that thing I think can more or less be chocked up to a parasocial relationship going wrong. If you have built up in your head that there is an intimacy there between you and a creator that never actually exists, it is a very short trip to real feelings of betrayal when this fictitious person you have created does something that you were not expecting. Please do not mistake me as giving folks an excuse for treating creatives horribly, but a lot of my dissection of this issue comes from a few situations I have dealt with in the past.

I’ve been on the creator side of a few one-sided relationships. I’ve had folks attribute the wrong things to my interactions online, or feel like they know me better than they actually did. Some years back I wrote about the concept of the “Monkeysphere” or the Dunbar Number theory stating that there is a maximum number of people you can possibly care about at any given time. I try my best to approach every interaction as though they might be a brand new life long friend. I’m recycling an illustration that I created for that article, but effectively at any given time there are orbits around me, and the closer to the center you get the more you actually know of me and hopefully the more I know about you.

Most interactions I have online are in the red and orange zones. Effectively this a group of people that I would consider to be “Past Acquaintances” and “Active Acquaintances”. It can take years for someone to migrate inwards for example there are folks like Scopique that I have interacted with for over a decade, and they are by nature probably going to rank a little further in on the bullseye than someone I just met recently. It takes a really long time for someone to make it to the close friend group and very few will ever reach the inner rings of people that I consider to be my actual close confidants. The thing is… I am by no means unique in this approach and I think more or less everyone has a version of this.

I think where things get really confusing again is that our brains are not great at interpreting stimulus. If you have someone who is on twitter and doesn’t follow that many people, each individual voice makes up more of their virtual world than someone like me that follows several thousand people. It is real easy to misinterpret this connection as having more importance than it actually is. Twitter, YouTube, Twitch and and even the comments section on this blog give you a level of access to another person that did not exist prior to the social media age. This access is real easy to mistake as a bidirectional connection.

LeVar Burton for example is one of my childhood heroes. I have tweeted at him before and he has even favorited one or two of my comments. I should not under any circumstances assume that it means that he knows who the fuck I am. I am one of 1.9 million people that follow him, but the danger stands when someone takes that brief interaction as meaning something significantly more. I am firmly convinced that so many of these bad interactions that we see between fans and “celebrities” are brought on by the imbalance of the parasocial relationship. The challenge at hand however is that I don’t really have an answer of how to fix the system

We were not wired for this sort of connectivity. All of the software in our brains was designed for face to face communication. This is in part why it is so damned hard to read intent correctly when all we have are written words on a page between us and another human being. However the internet has presented us with this era of very intimate seeming and completely one sided connections. Yet at the same time we have been sold on this notion that engagement with audiences is extremely important to make sure you are selling that illusion of a personal connection so that we care about the people behind the products we are being asked to consume. In many ways it is a deeply concerning and dangerous thing to ask.

I think I have more or less reached the end of this ramble. I am not sure if anything that I said made sense but I wanted to throw these thoughts out there. Since I had hosting issues this morning I decided to jot all of this down over my lunch break. I would very much love to read your thoughts in my comments, because it is a discussion I am interested in continuing.