A Vox reader asks: What exactly are parasocial relationships and why are they so prevalent now?
Here’s a hypothetical scenario: You hear your favorite podcasters every day. You know their voices by heart. They’re chatty and relatable, and they casually reveal all the details of their lives — and what they don’t say on the podcast you can easily pick up from following their social media accounts. Eventually, you start to think of them as people you know — even friends. So, it’s a rude awakening when you see them at a coffee shop one day and walk up to say hi, only for them to look at you like you’ve just accosted a complete stranger — because you have.
The reality is that, no matter how close a person feels to their favorite celebrities, influencers, politicians, or podcasters, these relationships aren’t reciprocal. When a person chooses to put time and energy into these one-sided relationships, we call them “parasocial.” The prefix “para” here takes the sense of approximating or substituting for something but not actually being the thing itself. These connections may feel social, but they aren’t.
Why, then, do so many people seem to feel like they are?
The easy answer to that is that humans are really good at projection. Witness all the humans who are currently tricking themselves into believing their gen AI tools are in love with them or are divine prophets.
The more complicated answer is that modern-day celebrity is constructed from an interwoven mesh of elements, ranging from unintended celebrity gaffes to intentional marketing, that result in a public persona that everyone feels entitled to. That’s because we all, in a sense, helped create it.
But are we creating monsters?
Parasocial relationships have been around for nearly as long as celebrity itself
The aspirational idea that we can have personal relationships with people we’ve never actually met is an intrinsic hope of humanity. It’s found everywhere from religion — Christians are encouraged to have a relationship with Jesus, a man who lived 2,000 years ago — to political systems. Think, for instance, of medieval soldiers who died fighting for the name of a king they were never in the same room with, nevermind the acolytes who go to bat for their preferred candidates today.
The association of these feelings with intense fandom dates back to at least the 19th century, and they’ve been stigmatized just as long. At the time, pundits coined the words “Byronmania” and later “Lisztomania” to describe European fan crazes for the darkly romantic poet Lord Byron and the flashy pianist Franz Liszt. Then, of course, came “Beatlemania,” which set the stage for an ongoing media tendency to dismiss fans as hysterical, oversexed young women — a misogynistic view that downplays the cultural importance of fangirls.
Fandom can be deeply meaningful and positively impactful for the millions who are involved in it, and handwringing about parasocial relationships often presumes that fans lack the ability to distinguish what’s real, flattening a variety of experiences and expressions.
But it’s also true that fans overstepping their boundaries makes things hard for the people they stan. Modern fan culture has shifted away from worshiping aloof Hollywood divas from afar and toward complex entanglements between fans and stars. This shift arguably began in the late aughts within K-pop fandom and grassroots gamer and vlog fandoms on YouTube and Twitch, then expanded into the influencer phenomenon, and finally — irreversibly — into modern celebrity “standom.”
While much of stan culture is positive and welcome between celebrity and fans — see the entire Taylor Swift ecosystem — much of it is overtly toxic. Some fans seek to control and direct their favorite stars’ private lives, even to the extent of shaming them and speaking out against them when they try to have lives outside of their public personas. Other segments of modern fans stalk celebrities openly, proactively, and proudly, often fully rejecting the idea that what they’re doing is wrong or causing their fave serious discomfort.
In the early years of influencer and stan culture, people who hit it big often had zero media training and zero preparation for how to deal with their new fame. Increasingly, however, celebrities have shown a heightened awareness of the complex nature of these relationships, along with a willingness to speak out instead of feeling pressured to appease their fans. Last year, for example, Chappell Roan spoke out about experiencing harassment, stalking, inappropriate behavior, and bullying — all of it coming from her own fandom. In recent years, celebrities including John Cena and Mitski have asked fans to stop filming them, with Mitski claiming the experience of having to perform for a sea of phones makes them feel as though they’re being “consumed as content.”
Most fans, however, never interact directly with the public figures they’re “consuming.” Instead, they’re interacting with the public persona that exists between the person and their fandom. And because that public persona isn’t entirely real to begin with, it’s easy for the boundaries that might exist in a real relationship to break down.
Why are we like this???
The word parasocial comes to us from sociologists Donald Horton and R. Richard Wohl, who, in 1956, penned the essay “Mass Communication and Para-Social Interaction: Observations on Intimacy at a Distance” in a volume of the research journal Psychiatry. “One of the striking characteristics of the new mass media,” they wrote, “is that they give the illusion of face-to-face relationship with the performer.” They dubbed this new form of mediated encounter “para-social interaction.”
Around the same time Horton and Wohl were navigating this new space between public performer and audience, renowned philosopher Jacques Lacan was positing that each individual exists in a kind of triple state: a symbolic representation of the self; an imagined, often idealized, version of the self that we internalize when we envision ourselves; and then the “real” self, the actual person who exists apart from the symbolic and imagined selves.
The result of all this sticky interdependence is an increase in fans feeling entitled to pieces of their celebrities’ lives.
Nowhere is this triple state more apparent than with celebrities. Film scholar Richard Dyer first articulated the concept of a “star text,” arguing that every Hollywood star exists simultaneously as themselves, as a constructed persona — a “text” — that might mean different things to different audiences, and as the symbol they represent. The construct of “Chappell Roan,” for example, is a glam queer pop idol, the deliberately camp persona of a Missouri native named Kayleigh Rose Amstutz. To her fans, she’s not just a singer, but a representation of liberated queer identity as performed through a range of complicated love songs and power anthems.
It’s this public-facing persona that stands apart from the individual celebrity and becomes a part of the cultural consciousness. It is partly created by the celebrity, partly created by their consciously cultivated brand, partly created by the narrative their fans and/or marketing team builds around them, and partly created by the pop culture zeitgeist. The public-facing persona becomes something the public can help create, expand upon, and shape. The persona is the thing that carries meaning, that can be venerated or excoriated or projected onto. And it’s the persona, not the person, with whom we have our “relationship.”
Fans rarely reach this “relationship” stage on their own. Modern-day celebrity uses the tools of intimacy to encourage fans and take their place in the culture. How much time, for example, do you spend letting your favorite podcaster or vlogger talk to you? It can be easy to start feeling like you’re besties with people when they’re chatting at you for hours a day. Then, there’s the marketing apparatus to consider. The celebrities, or at least their PR teams, often tacitly or strategically encourage fan relationships. Witness Jin, the oldest member of the wildly popular K-pop group BTS, bizarrely having to give 1,000 hugs to 1,000 fans upon his exit from his mandatory military service last year. The media undoubtedly plays a role in this invasive culture, as well, by encouraging rampant speculation about celebrities’ private lives. (Remember Kategate?)
The result of all this sticky interdependence is an increase in fans feeling entitled to pieces of their celebrities’ lives. The celebrity’s inability to control any of this is undoubtedly part of the tension around the parasocial relationship discourse. In many cases, even confronting the idea that an actor could be someone else outside of their professional persona can distress fans. It’s by no means only “extreme” fans who fall prey to this way of thinking. Think how many people on the internet were emotionally invested in John Mulaney’s divorce or the Try Guys scandal.
These media narratives play out the way they do precisely because so many people feel an intense amount of ownership over the lives of these people they’ve never met. Trying to repair this would mean having to undo over a century of prurient media obsession with the lives of actors, performers, and other famous people, as well as the subsequent impact on individuals who fall hard for their faves. It’s just not possible.
Parasocial relationships are here to stay — so stan responsibly
So, what’s the solution? It’s perhaps too simple to say “stan responsibly,” especially when fandom etiquette is arguably devolving faster than any of us are prepared for. But that might be the most rational way to approach the reality of parasocial relationships.
If you find yourself thinking it’s okay to share and interact with photos of celebrities in their private moments, maybe it’s time to check your level of investment in them and their life. If you find yourself getting caught up in increasingly bizarre conspiracy theories that make you seriously question what’s real and what isn’t, it’s probably time to step back before you get drawn in further.
If you have kids watching YouTube, make sure they understand the context for what they’re watching before your child starts to believe that the influencer kid she adores is her best friend. If you’re convinced your favorite podcaster hung the moon, maybe temper your expectations a wee bit, just in case they backslide into weird conspiracy theories and bizarre political talking points. I’m speaking from experience on that one.
Above all, remember that parasocial relationships are more or less like all other relationships. That is, they can be fun and engaging and emotionally rewarding — but only as long as they’re managed and handled with care.