“Perhaps, then, that Instagram shot or confessional tweet isn’t always meant to evoke some mythical, pretend version of ourselves,” he surmised, “but instead seeks to invoke the imagined perfect audience—the non-existent people who will see us exactly as we want to be seen.” “We are not curating an ideal self,” Alang added, “but rather, an ideal Ot... See more

The parasocial self is that which passively solicits engagement from others. From the perspective of those others, the parasocial self appears as a public performance of the private self. It embodies an inversion of the dynamics of agency we previously ascribed to the public self: we present the parasocial self publicly and invite others to approac... See more