If you aren’t familiar with the term “parasocial” I’d encourage you to dive into the term and its impact on our culture.
Parasocial interaction (PSI) refers to a kind of psychological relationship experienced by an audience in their mediated encounters with performers in the mass media, particularly on television and on online platforms.
A parasocial interaction, an exposure that garners interest in a persona,[6] becomes a parasocial relationship after repeated exposure to the media persona causes the media user to develop illusions of intimacy, friendship, and identification.
Wikipedia Parasocial Interactions
Because so little in daily life feels personal or reciprocal as intermediation and automation split us off from past norms of one-to-one relationships, parasociality is on the rise.
You and I are likely to be in some kind of parasociality in this blog post. It’s not a new phenomena having been theorized as far back as 1956, but social media’s ubiquity has now put all of us into varying degrees of parasocial interactions with each other. We have opinions about personas from movie star celebrities to niche Twitter accounts.
We don’t seem to have these parasocial relationships just with humans. There was a an era of corporate brand marketing (that seems to be fading) where we interacted with brands like as friends. I followed all sorts of Twitter accounts for brands that acted like personalities in the golden era of “funny” Twitter.
Yet as more and more people are becoming brands it seems that the old school idea of a brand as a an amorphous corporation is disappearing.
Perhaps it’s because we encouraged the cultivation of personal brands as a professional marketing necessity. Millennials leveraged carefully manufactured profiles to climb the last remaining rungs of the old career ladder.
Naturally this strategy has some drawbacks. During the Great Awokening/Weirding we saw inexperienced humans cope with the ramifications of having a reputation that extended far beyond work, family and community. Now we loosely call it cancel culture though it took years for the term to become less contested.
I’d like to encourage more people to not take things so personally. It’s not bad for be in parasocial relationships. In life we have varying degrees of intimacy and boundaries in even our closest relationships. No one is exactly one person or even persona. Next time you get really upset at someone else’s behavior try to remember it’s not about you. If someone gets upset at you recall that this still applies.