to all the parasocial relationships i've had before.
the difference between celebrities and influencers
🎶 Paris - Taylor Swift​
I am not an influencer, but I've certainly developed parasocial relationships with influencers. During my "research" phase for digital media, I watched countless YouTube videos, read influencer Substacks, and listened to podcast episodes, in order to try and wrangle out what it was that others were doing and what the general audience was interested in. Through this, I became weirdly attached to some influencers and repulsed by other influencers--but equally fascinated by both categories. While I'm a huge advocate of doing your research, I actually think this research phase did me a disservice--I only grew distracted by others and found myself in endless cycles of comparison. But how had I wound up in these parasocial relationships in the first place? As with many things in my life, the answer was video games.
This week, I delve into the parasocial relationships that I've developed over the years. I round off with a few links to what I've been looking at recently, including a video game studies course that I'm obviously taking!
traditional power and grassroots power in parasocial relationships.
My first parasocial relationship was with a video game character when I was around 10. I had been playing Final Fantasy X, and when I found out the true nature of the protagonist whom I was playing as, I started bawling. I went into the kitchen to find my mom, who immediately asked me what was wrong.
[spoiler warning for FFX] "Mom," I managed to make out between heaving sobs, "I'm--not--real."
"What do you mean, you're not real?" My mom clearly was puzzled. "Of course you're real."
"No," I tried to clarify. "My character--in--FFX--is just a dream." I gulped. "I'm not real!!!!!" I continued wailing. [/spoiler]
She chuckled a little and then gave me a hug. "It's okay," she rubbed my back. "It's okay."
But it wasn't okay. It wasn't going to be okay. Because from that day forth, I was filled with an incredible longing to connect to something--or someone?--in the real world in the same way that I connected with Tidus, Yuna, Lulu & co. through my TV screen. And I would spend many years, many false starts, and many dashed hopes chasing that feeling, whatever it was.
I've only recently begun dissecting this feeling in earnest. I used to think that my penchant for intense parasocial relationships stemmed from my being an only child who was often left home alone. After all, parasocial relationships have been shown to satisfy some of our affective, behavioral, and cognitive needs similarly to traditional bidirectional relationships and can also help us feel less lonely. Maybe I was just using parasocial relationships with fictional characters to offset some of my loneliness?
But as I've gotten older, made friends, and created a pretty active social calendar for myself, I still feel the pull of parasocial relationships. There's a satisfying depth to intensively researching someone online--what they put out there, what they appear to omit, what other viewers say about them--that is distinctly different from learning about someone through an in-person conversation. Even for people whom I meet IRL, I still love Googling them to see what they have put out there about themselves online. I'm always acutely aware that any time, we are merely a representation of ourselves, and that representation of ourselves says a lot about ourselves, our conscious and subconscious decisions, and our own relationship with the outer world. When anyone posts something online, they are attempting to foster a parasocial relationship with whomever is out there. Otherwise, they could just make whatever the thing is--video, newsletter, podcast--and keep it to themselves. But by posting online, there's a sense of them reaching out to the world and hoping, with sometimes a child-like naïveté, that others will reach back.
And once the audience has reached back, what does the creator owe this invisible now-audience? I had this discussion with a friend who's a professor, because we like talking about what's "appropriate" classroom behavior when we're standing behind the lectern instead of sitting in front of it. We know that in order to be good instructors, we need to be available to our students when they're taking our course. (We have both had our fair share of experiences trying to chase down professors.) But what do we owe former students? My friend's courses are quite large, so they were of the mind that they didn't owe former students anything and would only respond to those former students whose current work interested them.
I wasn't quite sure I agreed with that--after all, what is a professor without students? Except, of course, the very different incentive structures and institutional acknowledgment as between a tenure-track professor (them) and a non-tenure-track instructor (me). That's core to the central inquiry here: Who gave you power? The tenor of receiving power from large entities with large amounts of power feels different from receiving power in a more grassroots style, and the expectation we have for those who receive traditional power is different than we have for those who receive grassroots power.
For those who receive traditional power--from old educational institutions, from established media companies and publishers, from old money--they automatically feel more removed. I don't feel like I have contributed significantly to their power. I adore Professor Catharine MacKinnon's scholarship but have no illusions that either Yale Law or Michigan Law care about what I think when considering tenure offers. Sydney Sweeney was chosen to be in Euphoria by gatekeepers and executives whose existences I can barely fathom. And while I enjoyed Ronan Farrow's reporting, he was going to be a breakout star regardless of whether I read his articles. While I am sure that Professor MacKinnon, Sweeney, and Farrow feel some obligation to the powerful institutions which gave them their influence in society, I doubt they feel as large of an obligation to their Twitter or Instagram followers, and neither do I expect them to. After all, who am I? No one.
For those who receive grassroots power, on the other hand--anyone who generates any sort of following primarily through social media--they feel more immediate already. When I hit Subscribe or Follow, that's a direct act of contribution, just a little, to that person's power. When a creator does something I don't approve of, I unfollow or unsubscribe, even if I know that my one departure won't make that much of a difference to the creator's overall platform. But it still feels like the right thing to do, like voting.
This "voting" mechanic of following and subscribing on social media imbues social media platforms with a sense of democratic participation and election. And as with elected officials, the voters invariably feel that the elected officials have a duty to the very people who helped put them into office in the first place--and reasonably so. So it's perhaps not so surprising to see tweets and commentary about creators in the same way that we see discourse about politicians--people question how they got elected/their clout in the first place; people call them ugly; people urge others to de-platform or "cancel" those who have committed wrongdoings. Neither politicians nor creators are celebrities--they are individuals whom we have voted for, one by one. And that significantly colors our parasocial relationships with them in a fundamentally different way, both good and bad, compared to our parasocial relationships with fictional characters and celebrities.
🔖 open tabs
If your 2020 or 2021 income was under $125,000, you may be eligible for student loan forgiveness! The application for the one-time debt relief provided by the U.S. Department of Education is now open. Unfortunately, the program has already been challenged in court, but so far, courts--including the Supreme Court--have refused to block rollout of the plan. (AOC also went live to talk about a potential student loan forgiveness hack.) And if you don't think you'll qualify but are also interested in federal assistance with student loans, the Federal Student Aid page has a great summary of some options for loan forgiveness or assistance, including Public Service Loan Forgiveness (which law graduates do take advantage of, particularly if their law school doesn't offer some sort of public interest loan forgiveness/repayment plan) and Income-Driven Repayment Plan.
I'm going back to class! One thing I've recently realized about myself, as I think through how to make my career and life more coherent, is how much I love liberal arts learning. Adult education, though, can be difficult to find and hard to fit into schedules, so I was absolutely floored to discover the Brooklyn Institute for Social Research. I immediately signed up for this course on video game studies and am so excited to spend a few hours every week just theorizing. The topics will find their way to my podcast or this newsletter, I'm sure!
I'm intentionally stepping away from most brand deals for the foreseeable future, and it's because I see the creator field getting professionalized. I really loved what Hasan Minhaj said in a recent interview with Colin and Samir: "The reason why we didn't go to med school or become engineers is so we wouldn't have to clock in and out for Deloitte. But now we're doing that for YouTube. If you need to ask YouTube for a break--you've lost." Minhaj called this route the YouTube med school route, and I really agree. People ask me all the time about whether I'll return to practicing law, and while I truly do not know (and am not going to think about it until 2023!), I would certainly prefer practicing law to creating ads for a living.
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