Proactively Parasocial

One reason to have a blog is that posting is a proactive way to build parasocial relationships.

What are parasocial relationships?

I’m using relationships in the usual sense: how one person relates to another.

I'm using parasocial in the sense introduced by Horton and Wohl in their 1956 paper Mass Communication and Para-Social Interaction. They begin:

One of the striking characteristics of the new mass media—radio, television, and the movies—is that they give the illusion of face-to-face relationship with the performer… We propose to call this seeming face-to-face relationship between spectator and performer a para-social relationship.

The Greek prefix para- conveys that parasocial relationships are distinct from, but analogous to, social relationships.

In a broader sense, a parasocial relationship exists whenever one person knows of another person without interacting in the usual face-to-face manner. In this sense, we are parasocial to anyone we know about but have never met. Such relationships are old and natural things, never mind who first coined the term.

Since the beginning of time...

How do we come to know someone we have never met?

In principle, any of our senses can give rise to a parasocial relationship. Of these, sight and hearing are the most obvious.

For example, we are parasocial to anyone we see but have not met. In our broad sense, it is parasocial both to watch someone from afar and also to only acknowledge them in passing.

Human capacity for sight predates television, of course, and exemplifies how technology amplifies the parasocial. Although watching other people is old and natural, using technology to do so in a way that is up-close and face-to-face is not.

Parasocial-enabling technology need not be new to be potent. Take spoken language, for example. Stories are an old and natural source of parasocial relationships. We are parasocial to people that we have heard about but not met. Furthermore, a widely shared mutual language enables us to be parasocial to the speaker.

The parasocial-to-the-speaker wrinkle is further amplfied by the technology of writing. In so far as Homer's Iliad tells the story of a real man Odysseus who traveled home after the Battle of Troy, all who have heard the story have a parasocial relationship with Odysseus. Those who hear this old story anew today can not have met its original author. So they are also parasocial to the author.

Parasocial proliferation

In the internet era, parasocial relationships abound.

I am parasocial to anyone that I interact with online but have never met in person. I may be parasocial to you.

The internet supercharges media distribution. Not only writing, but also images, audio, and video. Hence, it extends the reach of those artifacts and so increases their parasocial potential.

The paramount example is social media, with new mechanisms for content interaction such as comments, and likes, and reposts. These lead to novel ways to form parasocial relationships.

Parasocial: problematic or productive?

Although a friend first introduced me to the parasocial concept to describe a negative context, the situation is nuanced.

The paradigmatic negative example is a lonely person who substitutes potential “real” social relationships with “fake” parasocial ones. Any person in the social media era who feels a sense of connection with someone that they have never met and likely will never meet. This feeling may inhibit forming worthwhile and meaningful in-person social relationsips.

In general, however, parasocial relationships can be productive. It can be helpful to have parasocial relationships with the deceased, with authors, and with the inspiring heros of stories.

I held on to the negative connotation of the parasocial for a while, proabably in part because of my natural inclination away from manipulative social media. Ultimately, though, I realized I have a many inspiring parasocial relationships: with my ancestors, beloved authors, and countless other personal heros.

In my work building and backing technology companies, I meet many people. Parasocial context—shared writing, ideas, and references—helps both sides decide whether it’s worth engaging.

And so I have a blog.