The Parasocial Dilemma

May 4th 2022



The Twitter verse is in flux these days. In one corner, you have a bunch of Bitcoin-bros hooting and hollering about Elon Musk taking over Twitter, in another, a gaggle of K-Pop stans going into meltdown about one of their favourite stars landing at their city’s airport, a bit further down there’s a thread arguing about how celebrities don’t follow the Met Gala theme. All while the world continues to trundle along around us, we’re deeply invested in our internet sphere, engrossing ourselves with the topics we want to talk about and perhaps even using these topics to block out the noise from the ‘real’ world. It’s a kind of blissful existence, this internet sphere.

We interact at a furious pace, with spaces such as Twitter and Instagram acting as a direct line from the superfan to the celebrity, the angry constituent to the politician, or simply to one another in our tiny corner of this enormous universe. It’s never been easier to communicate with your faves or your foes. Marshall McLuhan’s ‘global village’ theory is well and truly a real existence, where we cohabit with people with opposing views, shitposters, academics and everything in between.

One style of interaction that often precedes the discourse between users in these spaces is the parasocial relationship. Defined as “one-sided relationships, where one person extends emotional energy, interest and time, and the other party, the persona, is completely unaware of the other's existence”, the parasocial relationship defines a new kind of connection that most of us, aware or not, will encounter online. A clear example of this is the Beyhive (Beyoncé’s fans) or Taylor Swift’s Swifties, where millions of fans will declare themselves an army of supporters, following their idol’s every move and dedicating hours of their day to discussing, defending and hyping up the celebrity. While the ‘stans’ pour energy and time into their side of the relationship, the celebrity on the other side will most likely never meet or know their fans on a personal level. The celebrity, on a pedestal and holding the power in the relationship, is maintained in the public sphere and boosted by their fans’ enthusiasm and dedication to them. The fans, in return, feel a certain kind of community and friendship, both within their group and towards the celebrity themselves, possibly as or more important than their real-life friendships to some extent.

It’s not hard to fall into the thinking that, because so much of our life is online, we know everything about the people we see online. The celebrity may divulge what seems like a lot of personal information about themselves, or hold a particular legacy in their space, leading their fans to create a narrative about what they think to be the absolute truth about their favourite star or influencer.

One example of this legacy personality and parasocial interactions is the current dumpster fire that is Johnny Depp and Amber Heard’s public defamation lawsuit. While there is no question of Heard acting as an abuser toward Depp, what has struck me as remarkable is the complete army of people online who are keen to absolve any wrongdoing on Depp’s part, which I suspect is also stemming from the overwhelming public perception of him being a kind, family-loving legend. We all grew up watching Pirates of the Caribbean, I get it, but I had no idea of the sheer amount of people who came out to rally for him, even attempting to turn in TikTok videos as evidence for his case. People who have never interacted with Depp in their lives turned up at the courthouse to support him, while online they dodged the topic of his own alcohol-fuelled rages and the horrendous texts he had sent to Paul Bettany that would definitely shatter the image of him being the family hero we all think we know. The art of nuance and examining the abuse from both sides evaporated, fans made TikToks of Depp smirking and laughing in court with captions such as “Johnny OWNS Amber’s lawyer” while hurling abuse at Heard and her family. No matter who you think is in the wrong, there should be an understanding that, perhaps, creating memes and applying TikTok trends to a domestic abuse and defamation trial shouldn’t be classified as normal, functioning behaviour.

One of the most prominent figures of this discussion is author, DJ, businesswoman and all-around legend FlexMami, who started talking about parasocial relationships due to her own experiences online. “For the longest time I’ve been trying to find a way to exist peacefully on the internet, without having to feel as though I am now responsible for all of these people who happen to experience me”, she said to AllBright. “I would be behaving almost like an entertainer, a performer, or a jester; for consumption – without recognising that people on the other end were building friendships and connections with me. I had all these parasocial relationships that I didn’t know how to control, or I didn’t know what the rules or the guidelines or the expectations were”. The phrase “experience me”, again leaning into the trope of the fans experiencing the existence of the celebrity and not the other way around, reinforces the power and the pedestal that the celebrity stands upon. Fans, thinking that they knew Flex solely from her online persona, would take her existence and label her as a body-positive influencer, or request her thoughts on social justice movements or being a woman in a male-dominated industry, all the while failing to see that initiative or desire to become what they wanted her to be just wasn’t there. And why should it?

When we mould our favourite celebrities to be something that suits our own perspective and they don’t follow through, we feel let down and disappointed as if they were our own, personal friends. Applying our own insecurities and wants to somebody that we will never meet makes it easier for us to engage with and understand our own terrain, taking the responsibility and pressure off to do the work or find that inner peace ourselves. We collectively turn against them, labelling them as problematic and gleefully tearing them apart when tweets from 2014 resurface putting them in a bad light. “I always had a bad feeling about her and I knew I was right”, one comment said in the recent Tinx cancellation drama. We’ve curated a space that allows us to believe that somebody who will never be aware of our existence shows the deepest, most awful or vulnerable parts of themselves to our naked, parasocial eye. In a purist online society, there seems to be no room for nuance, growth or understanding. We see what we want to see and ignore the human element of making mistakes or setting boundaries.

With everything we do online being some sort of transactional interaction, none of us is safe from the parasocial dilemma. We can put the blame on whatever we want; celebrity culture, online purity, the domination of social media over our everyday lives, oversharing. But no matter where you think the blame falls, we operate in a vast, lawless internet culture where, eventually, the majority of our interactions and relationships will take place. It’s up to us to determine how we experience those relationships.