Proactively Parasocial

Summary

Proactively Parasocial One reason to have a blog is that posting is a proactive way to build parasocial relationships. What are parasocial relationships? I’m using relationships in the usual sense: how one person relates to another. I'm using parasocial in the sense introduced by Horton and Wohl in their 1956 paper Mass Communication and Para-Social Interaction. They begin: One of the striking characteristics of the new mass media—radio, television, and the movies—is that they give the illusion of face-to-face relationship with the performer… We propose to call this seeming face-to-face relationship between spectator and performer a para-social relationship. The Greek prefix para- conveys that parasocial relationships are distinct from, but analogous to, social relationships. In a broader sense, a parasocial relationship exists whenever one person knows of another person without interacting in the usual face-to-face manner. In this sense, we are parasocial to anyone we know about but have never met. Such relationships are old and natural things, never mind who first coined the term. Since the beginning of time... How do we come to know someone we have never met? In principle, any of our senses can give rise to a parasocial relationship. Of these, sight and hearing are the most obvious. For example, we are parasocial to anyone we see but have not met. In our broad sense, it is parasocial both to watch someone from afar and also to only acknowledge them in passing. Human capacity for sight predates television, of course, and exemplifies how technology amplifies the parasocial. Although watching other people is old and natural, using technology to do so in a way that is up-close and face-to-face is not. Parasocial-enabling technology need not be new to be potent. Take spoken language, for example. Stories are an old and natural source of parasocial relationships. We are parasocial to people that we have heard about but not met. Furthermore, a widely shared mutual langu...