Parasocial relationships get a lot of flak, but I think a lot of pop culture junkies could benefit from them. You guys need people you trust. You need soft spots. You need blind faith! You need to fall in love with a critic and then disagree with them wholeheartedly to remind you that you’ll live afterward. You need to interface with media you... See more

try as i might, i can only seem to understand myself through the fictions of the more actualized — and, just as i reassure myself that i am drawn to this media because of some predetermined, inherent sense of self, i wonder if it is creating me, too. who would i be if i stopped consuming things? what would there be left to feel?

Those of us who have a degree of fame have experienced the lack of mutuality in these relationships quite acutely: the strangeness of encountering a person who knows you, who sees you, whom you cannot see in the same way.

We are conditioned to care about kin, to take life’s meaning from the relationships with those we know and love. But the... See more

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