The Blurred Lines of Parasocial Relationships
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every.to
My guess is that smaller creators have a greater ability to respond to their smaller fan base, deepening these connections. Also, as some creators grow their content becomes more high-production, polished, and #sponsored which might feel less “organic” compared with smaller creators just starting out on a budget.
So, for example, I watch a variety of streamers on Twitch. On the larger streams, I almost never look at chat or chat myself. It's a sea of text and emotes already. No one in chat will read your message. The streamer certainly won't. So you're just listening or watching like to the radio or TV.
But a streamer with 200 viewers? You can often ask questions and get a response. It's a completely different dynamic.
It's still delusional thinking you can have a 'relationship' with someone on the other end of a screen that you are never going to meet in real life.
I agree with you in spirit. To an individual with thousands of followers, no single follower is more important than the mass. Obviously one of these followers could become a true friend, but friends dedicate time to nurture their friendships, and realistically nobody has enough time to keep that many friendships.
Because people would rather down-vote than change my mind!
It's overly cynical to think that you need to be intimate and in the flesh to call it a 'relationship' (in scare quotes?). It is a relationship. There's a real exchange of ideas and emotions.
> It's still delusional thinking you can have a 'relationship' with someone on the other end of a screen that you are never going to meet in real life.
With this, however, i disagree. It's old fashioned to think that friendships can only happen in meat space. Plenty of people actually prefer online and remote communication in many circumstances, since those can offer a way to meet people from wildly different cultures or with similar interests, whereas for others it's a great way to keep in touch with friends who are a long distance away.
For example, i currently live about 60 km from the nearest city in which I could find a significant amount of fellow developers, yet this very platform allows me to see what people all over the world keep themselves busy with. There is definitely a community aspect there.
In regards to personal relationships, some of my online friends are people with whom I can be more honest about my life circumstances than those that i face every day - since they could also have a larger impact on my life with their reactions and differing views.
100-200k people writing in the same chat is just too much for anyone to read it
I would think that goes both ways, no?
Someone small is going to take good care of a $100/month donator, for example.
(For the real biggest streamers who still get giant donations, like Hololives, it seems like the chat is actually in a parasocial relationship with itself…)
Nobody cares about an “ROI” metric, “marginal minutes of viewing content gained per marginal dollar given to personality.” If you meant real ROI (“dollars of revenue minus ad expense per attributed channel”) there’s no way this is true. This is how people observe that only the top 10 or so web destinations make any sense to advertise on but Google sends you traffic from 99,990 more trash websites that never convert, because in aggregate you might barely break even but the extra non converting traffic enabled Google to spend all your budget faster. D-Listers are definitely not ROI positive and anyone who measures that to be so is almost certainly making an attribution error or has a product that is already good enough to sell without targeted ads.
I'm not saying D-Listers are worthless. They aren't! They are ROI negative today. D-Listers are exclusively valuable for the potential of becoming A-Listers.
Anyway this parasocial relationship stuff is a huge red herring because people who aren't sick in the head and need followers for weird reasons are only doing this to become Hollywood stars.
Strongly agree…
And also won’t be surprised when some small team, or solo entrepreneur, turns this idea in to something they can sell for $obscene_sum
> Nobody cares about an “ROI” metric...
Except that you're responding to an obvious counterexample to your boldly-stated claim
That is, people feel like they can experience the emotions of a real friend, but without any of the obligations or real benefits of actual friendship.
Now people are abusing in the name of friendship: just use others, and don't reciprocate next time. This makes sense, if there are NO repetitive interactions, if looked from the perspective of Game theory.
Another reason why healthcare should be socially provided. You want your mental health practitioner like your judges - free from money worries so they can exercise their judgement truly independently.
There are too many candidate examples in my own life for me to ignore the possibility that their is some truth to the first sentence of your post.
When we're talking about influencers with hundreds of thousands of fans, like the ones which this article focuses on, the divide is still more well defined. However, when we get to people with only thousands of active followers, everything starts getting a bit murkier. What about a lesser known influencer at first forming parasocial relationship with a superstar and then actually connecting? I've seen this happen dozens of times with less known influencers connecting with the likes of Casey Neistat or Jon Olsson. [2]
There have definitely been times when it has seemed to me like a streamer on Twitch has been as dependent on their fans socially as their fans have been on them. A lot of this can be completely manufactured and facetious, but I think there are times when the non-stop schedule of the profession can seriously inhibit relationships outside of the cyberscape. Could be seen as another side of the coin when it comes to unhealthy forms of parasocial relationships.
I think the core question the article prunes at is amazing and I agree with just about all of it, just adding in some thoughts it provoked.
[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iqurYVWg7-g [2]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sLKspC7CGgs
In the future, we'll probably have "Her" style chatbots that are trained on a given influencer's persona so these parasocial relationships can be cultivated and monetized at scale.
IMO, we're this is about many-2-many communication figuring itself out, at scale. Many-2-many is our default mode, what we naturally do. A group of people talking shop over dinner, a bunch of kids deciding between soccer and tag.
Most "non-natural" modes are a diminutive version. Mass media, telephones, letter writing & most other technology enabled modes of communication cut down on the complexity. In journalism, one person writes, and the others read. In democracy, we have many-to-one communicates by voting... reducing communication to "yes/no."
The telephone works for one-to-one chats. Add more people, and problems crop up. Minor latencies are more noticeable. People talking over eachother becomes more grating. People zone out. Our innate abilities to handle many-to-many talking are subtle and hard to translate to technology. "Social media," from HN to Zoom to FB are all different ways of enabling many-to-many, an its unsurprising that this is fertile ground. Any difference to how the media, is designed yields major differences in form.
Anyway the social/psychological side of this is rapidly evolving. Hard to see where it ends up. I suspect CEOs/managers and such may eventually cultivate parasocial relationships. As this article implies, it's a phenomenon of the mode and medium of communication. They're already in the space, one-to-many relationships cultivated in a many-to-many medium.
I think it would be more apt to refer to this as few-to-few. As the number of people increases in a party, people prefer to splinter into small groups where they have a greater speaking to listening ratio than all stand around listening to one person speak.
See here for more: https://www.danielnettle.org.uk/download/002.pdf
The "parasocial" dynamic that the author describes is part of that complexity, emerging around central figures in a many-to-many scenario.
A very wise ending of a very thoughtful article.
And I think it's deeply unethical that some creators abuse this artificially created feeling of intimacy. In this case it's more like "parasitical relationships".
I think it's still true.
Leonardo Di Caprio is a surgeon picking his roles, he has had spells of 5+ years without a role. Doesn't interact or post on social media and he is seen as cooler than sellouts such as Dwayne Johnson who dilutes his brand on a daily basis acception roles in B movies and franchises, commercials and basically an all around dilution of his brand.
If you are a company looking for a face to the next marketing campaign you'll find yourself begging Di Caprio, not Johnson.
The problem with social media is that gives a raw number of followers, but it can't establish the "quality" of those followers.
If you have less followers than some other account it might be because your demographic maybe less impressionable, but for that exact reason they are bound to be more loaded then other demographics and if you try and sell them something the grand total in dollar terms will be higher even though the universe of followers is smaller.
I think this is true for entrepreneurs and businessmen as well...diluting the brand is something that affects everybody.
Musk tweeting daily and acting childish for example...compare him against a Jim Simons who keep his mouth shut, doesn't divulge his results and forces people to dig info on him and on the fact that his firm makes 10 M in profit for every employee
Be careful what you wish for: a moral comparison of “gargantuan hedge fund profits” to “Twitter clown” comes out initially worse for Renaissance, since hedge funds, especially the very effective ones, are extracting wealth from the inefficiencies of markets; this creates no economic value, it merely reallocates it to entities with pre-existing wealth and knowledge capital, and in particular siphons wealth from less developed economies. This action has a high potential to reinforce global inequity, which degrades opportunity and thereby slows the rate of human progress.
Whatever one may think of the persona, Musk’s companies supply products and services for which many lines can be directly drawn to improved quality of life for everyday consumers.
That is, simply, many (millions to billions) of people value electric cars, nation-scale grid batteries, underground transport systems, and the myriad of services they receive from orbital platforms.
Very, very few individuals experience the benefits of hedge fund returns, directly or otherwise.
The saving grace for Jim Simons is the subsequent philanthropy, which makes his hedge fund, in part, a private tax on inefficient market players that feeds forward into education and research, but without which the fund would be just another Gini multiplier.
Do they? I see them more as "more of the same crap, but with a techy gloss", for people who don't really need any of it, and whose marginal life improvement bu buying them will be close to zero.
(a) Does that impact you or anybody you know outside of a tiny amount with no difference in your life?
(b) What power-grid stabilization?
(c) What tunnel engineering? Where's the tunnel that makes any difference to people's lives (and a difference offseting the costs at that)? Or you mean the one in Las Vegas, a less than glorious 2 miles or so taking tourists around?
>In particular it seems to skip right past the work of the very many talented and brilliant people involved in those projects, in a hurry to be maximally glib.
The problem in the 21st century (as opposed to the 20th century technologists) is that "very many talented and brilliant people" work in crap, from selling ads, to the latest consumer BS.
Complaining about ads seems wildly off topic.
As for “what power grid”, that’s just another display of wilful ignorance.
Perhaps, but who really cares?
"Coolness" is a juvenile thing to aspire (or look up) to.
And Dwayne Johnson probably makes shitloads of money, has fun, and has tons of satisfied fans, whether dilluting his brand or not.
So there's that too.
He is the highest paid actor in Hollywood right now at a 87.5 million/yr. And yeah he seems like a real cool guy doing real fun titles.
If you are not an entrepreneur money has diminishing returns. After 10M net worth and no debt...it's all the same.
What money can't buy is the knowledge that you can do this:
1) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xUa7ikBHpaI
2) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hglyRJXCNCM
and that by now a cool billion people saw you doing it if you count: theatre releases + DVDs + cable + tv + legal streaming + illegal streaming
Again: who cares? Audience-wise both movies were watched less than some The Rock vehicles. It would only matter if The Rock was insecure and wanted to prove his is a "real actor", which never seemed to be his thing.
The audience of Di Caprio is emotionally deep, and loaded with money and relevancy , plus they are great storytellers themselves among their respective social groups. People of culture, people who have cumulatively billions of hours of interesting conversations to produce.
Johnson's audience is shallow, not loaded with anything except desire for the quickest dopamine hit they can get.
Di Caprio is sitting on a gold mine, it's the opposite for Johnson
There's a reason why Steve Jobs and Paul Allen loved The Beatles, Bob Dylan and Jimi Hendrix instead of Cardi B, Kanye West and One Direction.
Same goes for Di Caprio audience vs. Johnson's audience.
That doesn't appear to be true: https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0000138/#actor
tl;dr His only significant gap I can see since the late 80s is no movies between The Revenant (2015) and Once Upon a Time... In Hollywood (2019).
DiCaprio also can't do anything to defend his brand, which would've been good since everyone noticed he only dates 18 year olds and serially gets rid of them when they get too old.
As for Musk, I always thought his kids actually tweet for him…
And I think claiming Leo is "cooler" and better as an actor is a bit silly. Dwayne is an action star and the best at what he does, Leo does an entirely different thing with more dramatic, serious roles.
It's like comparing and NBA athlete to an NFL athlete. They aren't even competing against each other, and who cares?
Also both "Fast 8" and "The Aviator" fall under the same umbrella of motion pictures, although honestly, it shouldn't be like that .
It's not like we are talking Raffaello paintings vs. Bernini sculptures here
Relationship? What relationship? Creators who can offer only "slice of personal life" to the audience have no value. But wait? They are using Big Brother reality show model.
Everything for money and fame. And this is what? The future? No thanks.