Parasocial relationships

“Sometimes it’s better to be alone than surrounded by people who make you feel alone” — unknown

A while back in one of my original blog posts, I mentioned how a lot of the media we consume today is factoring into the perceived loneliness of many people in my generation. These media and content platforms often place us in the position of a spectator and create a sort of parasocial relationship between us and whomever we see on screen. To elaborate, a parasocial relationship is any sort of one-sided social relationship where the admiration and feelings on one end are not reciprocated on the other. Live streaming platforms like Twitch can simulate the conditions of friendship between viewers and streamers, and the same dynamic also applies to some degree on YouTube, Twitter, and Onlyfans as a symptom of the loneliness inherent in capitalist consumer cultures.

According to research conducted about parasocial relationships (here), particularly on adolescents and the formation of their identities, the greater the frequency of parasocial interaction, the more likely a parasocial relationship will be formed and the greater that devotion will be. Additionally, the study also found that high parasocial interaction (PSI) with characters (particularly soap opera characters compared to comedians and newscasters), “was associated with a lower inclination to communicate with real others”. The very platforms of OnlyFans and Twitch seem to be catered towards lonely consumers, having evolved from their predecessors by encouraging direct interaction with content creators. These content creators (like streamers) then become perceived friends who will never leave you and aren’t as likely to “disappoint” you as much as a relationship with some other person where there are other expectations involved.

There is quite a lot out there to indicate that people who engage in these parasocial relationships are actually lonely. One paper (here) even suggests that the best indication of future loneliness is past loneliness. Using the findings of other similar studies, this paper describes how loneliness actually spreads from person to person. As a part of the study, examinations were conducted periodically to gauge how lonely the participants were through a questionnaire. The researchers also asked participants to name those whom they thought of as friends. The results of this examination came out to be both unsurprising and profound. Those with more friends were less likely to experience loneliness in the future, whereas those who were lonely, not only tended to receive fewer friendship nominations, but they would also lose some of the friends they already had by the time of the next examination. However, what’s really interesting to me about these studies is that the proximity of relationships mattered. According to the study, having distant friends didn’t affect how lonely an individual was, but the opposite was true with friends who were in close proximity (approximately a mile away). In light of this, the researchers suggested that the spread of loneliness may be caused by frequent social contact with lonely individuals.

Loneliness obviously isn’t the only thing that spreads from person to person, and there is no debate about the fact that proper social interaction and connection feel good. Viewers are probably more likely to think of their favourite media figure as a friend the more lonely they are, using these figures as content to fill the void of social interaction in their lives. Viewers turn towards content creators for 2 main reasons: (1) entertainment, but also for (2) the illusion of social interaction. Just like is stated in the study, “feeling socially isolated can lead to one being objectively isolated”, suggesting that perceived isolation is a more successful marker of loneliness than actual isolation, which also implies that if one is truly alone but doesn’t perceive themselves as such, then they won’t be as likely to actually feel lonely. The illusion of connection with a streamer or a Youtuber themselves, and the communities surrounding such individuals both supply a perceived sense of community and intimate connection which can help the viewer to not feel so alone, at least until the stream ends.

“Spectators are linked solely by their one-way relationship to the very centre that keeps them isolated from each other. The spectacle thus reunites the separated, but it reunites them in their separateness.” — Guy Debord

In Guy Debord’s famous work, “The Society of the Spectacle”, he makes the case that consumers are the ones who impose on themselves their alienation from their peers, the world, and even from themselves through the capitalist production and consumption of spectacles. The Society of the Spectacle suggests that much of an individual’s identity finds itself based on the artificial ideas represented by the things one consumes. It is the manufactured personality of a brand’s image that’s meant to be symbolized by the company’s products, and those products are meant to suggest something about the personality of those who consume them. However, instead of enriching one’s identity, this centre of self-expression and character actually dilutes the thing that makes a person unique.

Much of contemporary culture is a consumerist culture, which in some ways also makes it a culture of loneliness. Being is in many ways replaced with having, and having it replaced with appearing. Philosophically, parasocial relationships are nothing but a profound expression of estrangement from person to person. In capitalism, we make sure to announce our tastes, opinions, and loyalty to our consumption and its representatives, and in the process, announce our loneliness in the hopes that it’ll connect us to another who thinks as we do. However, all it manages to do is isolate us even more from the potential friends around us. Even during live streams, viewers are cut off from the real world and from each other as the only thing they are guaranteed to share in common is their shared enjoyment of that streamer or content. While it’s true that some people are able to find friends in the chats of these streams, I believe that the typical viewer is mostly interested in expressing their feelings, thoughts, and opinions to the streamer.

Throughout this post, I haven’t been trying to present this information as some sort of profound new insight that we’ve all been too ignorant to realize. In fact, I’m sure that many people are aware of the potential negative implications of parasocial interactions. But I hope that by looking closer at this social phenomenon, we can find ourselves not so much reaching new conclusions, but rather approaching these concepts in a new way. The loneliness of others doesn’t just affect them, but it affects us personally as well in the formulation of our own lonely thoughts and down to the very constructs that formulate our society. The impact of these relations still demands to be explored, so that in doing so we may one day liberate ourselves from these lonesome influences.