The Parasocial Relationship

Why we love strangers on the internet

Category: The Digital Age

This booklet is for people who’ve realized they have feelings, real feelings, about people who don’t know they exist. You follow their lives. You care about their problems. You celebrate their wins and mourn their losses. They’ve never met you. They don’t know your name. They wouldn’t recognize you on the street.

The Recognition

You’re watching a video. The creator shares something personal. You feel a pang of concern. Real concern. Like you’d feel for a friend. Then you remember: they’re not your friend. They don’t know you exist. But the concern is real. The care is real. The feeling doesn’t match the relationship. That mismatch is the first sign.

The Language Clues

“We.” The creator says “we.” “We’re going through something.” They’re creating collective experience. Including you. You’re not in the collective. You’re in the audience. But the “we” makes you feel included. That’s intentional. The “we” is a tool. The personal address is parasocial engineering.

What It’s Taking

You’re expending emotional energy on people who aren’t expending emotional energy on you. They can’t. They don’t know you. The energy is finite. You’re spending it on one-way relationships. The feeling of connection is preventing you from seeking actual connection. Why reach out to a friend when you feel like you just spent time with one? Except you didn’t. You watched a video.

Good Company

Alone Together — Sherry Turkle, 2011
Turkle spent fifteen years studying how technology reshapes intimacy. Her finding is precise and uncomfortable: we’re designing connections that give us the feeling of closeness without the cost of it. She interviews teenagers, adults, and robot owners, all describing the same thing. The warmth of presence without the risk of being known. The book that named the trade you’ve been making without realising the terms.
Her — Spike Jonze, 2013
Joaquin Phoenix falls in love with an operating system. She’s warm, attentive, always available, never disappointing. She learns his rhythms. She says the right things. She feels like the most intimate relationship he’s ever had. She’s also talking to thousands of others simultaneously. Jonze made the most tender, honest film about loving something designed to make you feel loved, and the moment you realise the intimacy was architecture, not accident.
A Crow Looked at Me — Mount Eerie, 2017
Phil Elverum made this album after his wife died. It’s the opposite of parasocial, every word is unbearably real, unperformed, unoptimised for engagement. There’s no character. No curation. No brand. Just a man with a microphone saying the true thing with no audience in mind. It’s devastating and it recalibrates something, after listening, the difference between manufactured intimacy and the real thing becomes impossible to ignore.