The Real and Unreal with Parasocial Relationships

Social Media is Parasocial Media

Beetlemania as an early mode of modern parasociality

I’ve been thinking about parasocial relationships as of late. If you are not familiar, a google search yields the following: “parasocial relationships are one-sided relationships, where one person extends emotional energy, interest and time, and the other party, the persona, is completely unaware of the other’s existence. Parasocial relationships are most common with celebrities, organizations (such as sports teams) or television stars.”

So we have two players in this dance-of-sorts: the person and the persona, the fan and the star, the follower and the influencer. It mimics normal or “real” relationships, ones that involve two free agents engaged with one another in a variety of different ways. We have all kinds of relationships: familial, romantic, political, affinity-based, institutional and educational to name just a few. All of these imply a person-to-person interaction and connection. There is no confusion about the realness of the actors, however unequal relationships can be.

Essential to our sense of satisfaction with any and all relationships is the belief that they are real, and that there is some kind of give-and-take between two agents. When we find out that our best friend betrays us the horror is, in part, a recognition that the relationship was not real. It was a counterfeit. What you thought was real, true, and good, was fake, false, and bad. And though no one escapes such betrayals, we are all of us on the hunt for companions, friends, lovers.

We are social animals and only gods or monsters can live without a community. Though the word “community” has been stretched and abused, we know that we need it and somehow we know we are less without it. We become (hopefully) greater than the sum of our parts. Being a human being presupposes being part of relationships. Relationships determine our ability to belong, to be-long, with both others and even ourselves (oddly enough). And in Christian terms, we are promised that we can have and should have a relationship with Jesus himself. Remember Lennon getting pillioried in 1966 after remarking that the Beatles were “more popular than Jesus”? For the screaming girls in the top photo, it seemed so very true on the faces of it.

But what about our own time and place? We live in this strange wrinkle in time in which we can actually COUNT our friends. I’m thinking here of our “friends” and “followers” on our Social Media accounts. What exactly ARE these relationships? Are they real or fake? Is there some kind of third option? Are our virtual friends different from our IRL or meatspace friends? Why all the confusion? What has our outsourcing of our relationships to apps and digital mediation done to the quality of our lives?