The world has changed immensely in these last few years. The internet has become an integral part of our existence, and with it, people all over the world can connect in ways that no one thought possible before. New viable fully online careers have emerged, one of the most prevalent are Youtubers, or more recently, streamers. These people make a living out of creating entertaining or educative content to their online audience, which can mean millions of people all over the world.
Yet through all this incredible interconnectedness, the main issue felt by the youth of today is ironically, loneliness. Particularly considering the effects of the pandemic, most of our interactions with other people nowadays are constrained to online spaces only. And with most of our relationships developing online, it can be hard to sort it out sometimes. For today I’m going to talk about a new kind of online relationship between regular people and content creators that might be unhealthy if left unchecked. It’s called a parasocial relationship.
What differs live streaming from other forms of media entertainment, is interactivity (however limited it can be). If you’re watching a movie or tv show, you can’t really interact with it in any meaningful way. It’s a prepackaged, scripted and edited piece of media being replayed on your screen. But with livestreams, the entertainer is actually there talking to you, the audience. And if you type out a message, they can respond in real time too! It’s almost like an actual conversation between two people, almost.
A parasocial relationship is different to having online friends or other kinds of healthy relationships that can be had over the internet. What defines a parasocial relationship is that it’s completely one-sided. It’s where you’re keeping investment in a person you care about, like you would with a real social relationship, but the other person doesn't even know you exist. At most you’re just a username on a chat box that they see on a screen. And this kind of relationship is obviously unhealthy.
See, when a big name streamer says your name out of the sea of thousands clamoring for attention, there’s a certain kind of rush to it. You feel special, noticed, valued. That’s why there are some people who donates hundreds of dollars at a time just to get the streamer to read out their message. Enough of these “interactions” and you’ll start to feel like you’re becoming friends with the streamer, even though that’s not what’s happening at all.
You start to talk about that online personality as if you know them, and maybe to a certain extent that’s true. When you’ve been following someone’s stream or videos for a while, you start to recognize their likes and dislikes, their hobbies, their way of talking, you can even get a sense of what they’re thinking or feeling. You might even start to think of them as a friend. Maybe you’ll start casually mentioning them in real life conversations as if they’re just another friend you hung out with yesterday, even though again, they don’t even know you exist.
This can create problems for both the online personality, and the audience. For the online personalities that stream and produce content for a living, sometimes you get weird people that contact you and start talking in an overly familiar way, maybe they already consider you to be a close friend, or even more than that. However much you mean to them, for you all they are is a stranger deluding themselves thinking that they’re something more.
A dangerous problem for the audience is that sometimes, the content creator that you watch isn’t really a good person deep down. There are so many cases of youtubers or streamers that abuse their power and position to take advantage of their unexpecting (often young) fans. They can use their status as a celebrity to get unearned trust from their fans, who are just happy that their favourite content creator is even talking to them, not realizing that it’s with bad intentions. We need to be aware of these potentially dangerous scenarios. We especially need to prepare our children to navigate this big scary online world more safely.
As we get older, we learn to reconsider and sort the relationships we have with other people into their proper context. Any kind of relationship has to be properly built up. You can’t take shortcuts in getting to know someone, building trust and a strong bond takes time and effort from both parties. With the internet now being an essential part of our lives, it opens up so many wonderful possibilities, but we have to be aware of the pitfalls it hides as well.
