Parasocial Relationships, Content Creation, and Being an Internet Personality

Earlier today, I was watching a video that a friend posted on LinkedIn. I know, I know, it’s a weird cesspool of productivity hacking bros, professionals giving each other and themselves butt-pats, and the unemployed begging for work. In my defense, LinkedIn is a great place to go when I want to feel like garbage for a bit.

(Which is apparently approximately once a day for about five to ten minutes.)

Anyway, this video was about parasocial relationships and what the creator ultimately dubbed “sarapocial relationships.”

For the uninitiated, parasocial relationships are the relationships we form with people who we know a lot about but do not (or cannot) know anything about us. We hear a lot about it these days in terms of internet personalities, influencers, and content creators on a variety of platforms. This includes things like the ways that people build personal relationships with famous internet personalities like Mr. Beast, someone who spends inordinate amounts of his time and money putting out videos on YouTube.

Parasocial relationships can also be with fictional characters — think the people who develop strong attachments to characters like Harry Potter. This manifests in a variety of ways, from self-insert fanfiction to the trend of anime fans having a waifu or best girl that they prefer, but they are functionally similar to the parasocial relationships that we develop with real people.

And, while there has been a notable increase in conversations about parasocial relationships in the past decade or so, they’ve been around for a long, long time. Think about celebrity worship, like teenagers having posters of famous and beautiful women or handsome men plastered on their walls. It probably goes back much farther than that, though — the video mentioned having parasocial relationships with Zeus or Apollo.

Anyway, you can find the video below. It’s well worth the eight minutes or so that it’ll take to watch.