Phaedeaux
Unlike social scientists, I tend to like it when terms lose their precise meaning and begin to speak to a larger zeitgeist, a complex of related phenomena, a shared sense of something driving historical change that resists being dissected and contained into sterile lists of component parts. (I often think of those aggressively undialectical analyses as the "There are four ways that computers affect society..." school of social science papers. Really? Only four?) I like the term "vibes," for instance, because it both describes and exemplifies this drift: how terms like "algorithm" or "Web3" or "influencer" or "vibe" itself stop referring to strictly specific things and become vibes — a way to evoke the structure of feeling around particular developments where technology and society intersect.
Often, when it is a matter of a term of art in some particular field, there is a chorus of academic voices protesting this loss of precision; as a term escapes their bailiwick and becomes vernacular, their frustration seems to mount, and their calls for careful usage come to sound more and more condescending, like a parent telling a child, "There, there, that's not a toy." "That's not what an algorithm is." It always seems to me that they're hoping that if they contain the discussion to proper circles, it will be as though the pathogen has been re-sequestered in the lab, and its effects on society at large can be once again treated as purely theoretical. Once a term is in the wild, it no longer merely describes something in a faux-neutral sort of way; it becomes a causal agent and begins to dictate new practices, serving as a recipe.
"Parasociality" seems like one of these terms. When it was coined in 1956 by sociologists Donald Gordon and Richard Wohl, they meant it to describe a "seeming face-to-face relationship between spectator and performer" that was modeled after the "primary group" relationships one has with family and friends, only without the same reciprocity. In their view, parasocial relations could be pedagogical — they exemplified "the patterns of conduct one needs to understand and cope with in others as well as of those patterns which one must apply to oneself" — or compensatory, allowing "the socially and psychologically isolated with a chance to enjoy the elixir of sociability." Recently, the term has caught on as a way to talk about the sorts of relationships that are being produced to take maximum advantage of the affordances of new media forms like podcasting, livestreaming, social-media influencing, and so on.
In their paper, Gordon and Wohl were thinking largely of talk-show hosts, but they also provide a striking description of some proto-ASMR programming. Consider the 1950s radio show "The Lonesome Gal": "Her entire performance consisted of an unbroken monologue unembarrassed by plot, climax, or denouement. On the continuum of parasocial action, this is the very opposite of self-contained drama; it is, in fact, nothing but the reciprocal of the spectator's own parasocial role." An excerpt from one of the Lonesome Gal's monologues sounds like it could be a generic ASMR script: "Come, lie down on the couch, relax, I want to stroke your hair gently ... I am with you now, always with you. You are never alone."
Or consider Count Sheep with Nancy Berg, a five-minute-long show that then aired at 1:00 AM in New York: "She emerges in a lavishly decorated bedroom clad in a peignoir, or negligee, minces around the room, stretches, yawns, jumps into bed, and then wriggles out again for a final romp with her French poodle. Then she crawls under the covers, cuddles up for the night, and composes herself for sleep. The camera pans down for an enormous close-up, and the microphones catch Miss Berg whispering a sleepy 'Good-night.' " In the New York Times article that Gordon and Wohl cite for these details, Berg is quoted as saying, "This is five little minutes of being myself, which is all I'd want to be anyway."
These examples make it seem as though parasociality was the same then as it is now: a set of techniques for generating the feeling of intimacy in atomized audiences. But it was coined in a time when there was a clear assumption of what "normal" or "real" intimacy consisted of. "For the great majority of the audience, the parasocial is complementary to normal social life," Gordon and Wohl write. "It provides a social milieu in which the everyday assumptions and understandings of primary group interaction and sociability are demonstrated and reaffirmed." Parasociality was parasitic on "real" sociality.
Decades later, it is not so clear that there is a "normal social life" that operates outside of media and is uninflected by those forms. "Social media" feels more like a redundancy; sociality is media, more or less, and you could argue that sociality follows from parasociality rather than the other way around: the relations with media figures has become "primary" and the relations with family and friends to some degree are patterned on the possibilities for intimacy in and through media rather than through some fiction of "true presence" or "really being there with people."
Restricting "parasociality" to its original definition works to mask that inversion; the term becomes an expression of nostalgia for "primary relations" that weren't affected by the media surround. But it seems more useful not to be faithful to its original meaning but to expand the term so that it evokes the collapse of the formerly parasocial into the formerly primary while also evoking the new modes and intensities of connectivity, the new kinds of togetherness and isolation and self-alienation that make it possible for us to seek to get to know ourselves as if we were a stranger — as if we needed algorithms to introduce us to who we really are. Parasociality is "intimacy at a distance," but there are so many different ways to understand "intimacy" and "distance."