Saved by Stuart Evans
The parasocial friends you'll never meet
parasocial interaction.[3] It’s what you call the imaginary psychological relationship that fans think they have with celebrities.
Kat Vellos • We Should Get Together: The Secret to Cultivating Better Friendships
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
Koji • Spheres of Self: Performativity and Parasociality in the Metaverse
sari added
In digital spaces, brands can have personalities and influencers with whom one has never met can feel like close friends. These are consequences of the same thing. The parasocializing force that humanizes corporations also serves to abstract the individual, collapsing individual identity into something more synthetic and structured
Koji • Spheres of Self: Performativity and Parasociality in the Metaverse
sari added
And while it’s tempting to dismiss it as a shallow trick to boost engagement, I’ve come to view it slightly more charitably. Cultivating the parasocial by attaching one’s face or voice to the content itself is a powerful way to make people care more about something—effective marketing if not a source of underlying quality. As AI normalizes the idea... See more
Drew Austin • The Internet's Meaning Crisis
Alex Dobrenko added
andrea and added
This is the ultimate trapdoor in the hall of fame; to become a prisoner of one's own persona. The desire for recognition in an increasingly atomized world lures us to be who strangers wish us to be. And with personal development so arduous and lonely, there is ease and comfort in crowdsourcing your identity. But amid such temptations, it's worth re... See more
Gurwinder • The Perils of Audience Capture
Every time you find a new favourite blog or Twitter account or Tiktok personality online, you'll have to ask: Is this really a whole human with a rich and complex life like mine? Is there a being on the other end of this web interface I can form a relationship with?
Maggie Appleton • The Expanding Dark Forest and Generative AI
sari added