Hot take: Social media is the means by which all relationships become parasocial. Even if you know a personal IRL, your interaction with them online is asymmetrical, because you only ever interact with a curated version of them: affection directed toward a shadow.
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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.
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At what point does IRL interaction become indistinguishable from parasocial interaction is my question
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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
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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.
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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.
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'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.
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Agreed. I'm sweating under the heat of my own hot take here. I guess my main concern is the growing commodification of personhood in general. Social networks prioritise the creation of a personal brands, and exploit the language of authentic relationships to thrive on misery.
End of conversation
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