I don't think your wife would appreciate that.
(joking, but the point is that non-para-social relationships, "real" ones, exist and can usefully be distinguished)
(joking, but the point is that non-para-social relationships, "real" ones, exist and can usefully be distinguished)
I once believed in real relationships.
They’re just ideas running through meat.
Once you look closely enough, the distinction collapses.
I used to think otherwise, but that was largely based on a refusal to look, knowing that if I did, the perceived reality would fall apart, and the naked nothing would be revealed.
TCP.
But with respect to the shared net. The experience that makes a dent in the fabric of reality as shared or known by all, personalizes the universe to a subdomain.
Once I had the words. Now that’s gone too.
Like for me, the way I experience parasocial relationships most vividly is in educational YouTubers with a particular niche. I'll binge their videos and then they become emblematic of that domain of knowledge to me. And I'll have little imagined chats with them when I have ideas about that domain, where they generally take the opposite side of a view I might be developing and debate me. But really this is just the voice I've always talked to in my head wearing a mask, I don't know who these people are.
To borrow your analogy, they're sending unicast datagrams, and I'm sending TCP to their same address, but there's a firewall rule remapping it to localhost.
If the words come to you, I'm still listening, but there's 0 Pascals of pressure.
If you're a solipsist, it doesn't matter, but then nothing does.