Gregory Marks

how do you know I don't do the same thing irl

Because a parasocial relationship is necessarily one-sided and mediated: one party is a spectator via mass media to the actions of another. One can be fake or secretive IRL, but the interaction is still immediate and conversational.

Whether or not there is an easy division between mediated images and "reality" is a whole other problem, of course. Society of the spectacle, hyperreality, etc.

At what point does IRL interaction become indistinguishable from parasocial interaction is my question

Oh also, I wonder if this applies to messaging apps the way it does to social media, since messaging is conversational even though I'm sure the medium affects the way the conversation takes place

I'm mostly thinking of the big social media platforms here. For instance, my primary interaction with Facebook or Instagram is a passive, unidirectional "like" -- reducing the social to the parasocial -- whereas Messenger, while limited in its own ways, is a two-way street.

I think Twitter provides a good range of examples: The comments under a celebrity's post are typically parasocial; smaller friend groups are social; but often the division is blurred, as mid-sized accounts effect an appearance of intimacy through maintenance of a personal brand.

'Blurred' is the crucial term here. I think "all relationships become parasocial" is far too general to include the variety of ways people navigate their digital relationships. The argument seems to fall into a trap of extrapolating universality from particulars.

I agree irl interactions aren't premeditated but the instantaneous nature of response we correlated with sincerity always read to me much more insincere, as if the response devolved into the persons belief of how a person like them should respond in a socially accepted manner.

Even with the dishonesty found everywhere on the Internet, I believe it gives us a better more broader scope of a persons character and how they see themselves or want to be portrayed. Achievable if you yourself have learned to "read" character better.

This is an excellent point. But what I like about the concept of parasocial interaction is that the term is able to avoid questions of honesty, deception, and authenticity. It's a question of structure and form: How does the medium shape the interaction? Is reciprocity possible?

Agree but I think its also possible to see it as an abstracted intensification of asymmetries in expectations of decorum, manner, position, etc. If meatspace has its own linguistic/behavioral mediations, maybe social media is both para and meta-social in its emulation of them

Para/meta-social relations offline: priest-parishaner, analyst-analysand, business-customer, teacher student, parent-child come to mind, really anything but "true friendship" is asymmetrical, and even then symmetry and authenticity aren't nessissarly best measures of a friendship

Online or offline there are always problems of transference, social media is a bit of a transference machine accelerator, heating it up, cooling it off, blowing it up, breaking it off.

The parasocial isn't just asymmetrical, it is mediated and mass produced. The priest, analyst, etc. is still someone in the same space as you, who talks back to you alone. The parasocial is addressed to a mass, and each in this audience imagines a personal address to themselves.

"affection directed toward a shadow" is marvelous.