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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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.
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Perhaps a better offline example would be the performer or the politician, who addresses a crowd. I'm thinking of how Klaus Theweleit discusses the fascist speech-makers whose rants would be read as a personal address and vindication: "The labor is his, the intoxication theirs."
Thanks. Twitter will use this to make your timeline better. UndoUndo
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Thanks, that's an obvious distinctions I missed,.....mass address and personal reception.....now I'm thinking of sermons, personal relationships with god(s), and the artistic object, is that what we are online? preachers, gods and artworks.
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Oh I didn't even think of the God angle, that's a good one. Not to be flippant, but it works as a kind of precursor to the online parasocial relationships formed with characters / personas. People fall in love with distant objects: be they gods, images, or fictions.
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That sort of comes back to navigating transference, a certain distance is necessary to produce and maintain it, the collapse or disavowal of that distance (As in the case of the fascist leader perhaps) is where things go wrong.
End of conversation
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