All of my relationships live, at least in part, in my phone, where they are forced to share space with everything else that happens there. Lately, the feeling creeping up on me is that the pieces of my relationships that exist on that screen seem less and less distinguishable from all the other content I consume there.
A lot happens inside my phone. It’s always trying to sell me stuff. Sometimes, it tries to scam me. It has games, videos, TV shows, movies, news, health trackers, podcasts, books, music, shopping, maps, work software, regular old internet browsing, and an app I was forced to download in order to use my doorbell. And, of course, it contains all of my social interactions that are not face-to-face or via snail mail. (Even face-to-face interactions, unless I bump into someone on the street, were probably planned via smartphone.)
So when my phone does its little mating calls of pings and buzzes, it could be bringing me updates from people I love, or showing me alerts I never asked for from corporations hungry for my attention. When I pull it out, content and communication appear in similar forms—notifications, social-media posts, vertical video—and they blur together. As interactions with loved ones converge with all the other kinds of media on smartphones, Samuel Hardman Taylor, a professor who studies social media at the University of Illinois at Chicago, told me, “our relationships are becoming a part of that consumption behavior.” When the phone becomes more of an entertainment hub, using it for social interaction can feel more optional. And picking my loved ones out of the never-ending stream of stuff on my phone requires extra effort.
Since social media’s earliest days, regular people have been using it to perform their life and treat their loved ones as an audience. But now social media is eating media-media’s lunch, nibbling into time that used to be spent watching TV and movies, particularly for younger generations, and refashioning itself less as a network and more as a broadcaster. In the process, it has become less, well, social. These sites no longer seem to care whether non-influencers with small followings post anything or respond to anyone, as long as they keep scrolling.
And as social media has shifted away from connecting users with people they know and toward pushing AI slop and algorithmically targeted short-form videos from who-knows-where, a dissociative sort of mushing has occurred. The posts from my friends and family are still there, but they are absorbed into the flow of brain rot and advertising. Here an ad for washable ballet flats, there a picture of my friend’s baby, then a baby I don’t know performing some meme-worthy antic, followed by a reel about how Millennials are lame for wearing high-waisted jeans, a video of my friend looking hot in high-waisted jeans, an ad for trendy jeans, sponcon for weight-loss drugs so that you can fit into your jeans from high school that are suddenly trendy again. All of it passively consumed, all of it scrolled on by.
This more passive social-media experience adds a layer to some of my relationships that can feel almost parasocial. Parasocial relationships, classically, are the sort of one-sided imagined relationships that people feel with celebrities or even fictional characters. People develop an emotional connection to someone they have only ever encountered through a screen (or, I guess, the pages of a novel), and a sense that they know this person even though they don’t, really. Gayle Stever, a psychology professor at Empire State University who researches parasociality, told me that the distinction between social and parasocial relationships has long been fuzzy, and social media has made it even less clear.
Lack of reciprocity is a key part of parasocial relationships—the fan knows a lot about the celebrity while the celebrity has no idea who the fan is. But now a celebrity might respond to your comment on TikTok, or even follow you back. At the same time, reciprocity is a crucial part of real relationships, but for the online component of those relationships, it can be more of a guideline, one that’s getting looser as time goes on. Sometimes I respond to a friend’s Bluesky post or Instagram story. But most of the time I don’t. Instead, I let these bits of content pass in one eye and out the other. I amass bits of knowledge about my loved ones—my sister’s boyfriend published a poem; my friend left her job—as a spectator, in the same way that I might learn about an influencer’s favorite books, or about Taylor Swift’s engagement.
The parasociality researchers I spoke with weren’t willing to say that this passive consumption is definitively parasocial behavior—I do know these people, after all—but they did say that, in some ways, social relationships are starting to look more like parasocial ones. Bradley Bond, a communications professor at the University of San Diego, did a couple of studies during the social-distancing era of the pandemic, when many people were seeing many of their loved ones only through technology. The results suggested that “increased exposure to real-life friends through screen media may blur the lines between the social and parasocial,” as one study put it, because of the similarity in format. “Your mind is kind of slightly being rewired,” Bond told me, “to understand those social others as also being two-dimensional.” In parasocial relationships, he said, people tend to use their imagination to fill in the gaps of what they know about someone. For instance, someone might assume that an actor they relate to must share their values, even if they don’t know that person’s political beliefs. “As real-life relationships seem more like parasocial relationships,” Bond speculated, “maybe we stop asking for self-disclosure and start assuming, much like we do with parasocial relationships.”
If people feel a little like audience members observing their friends’ lives when looking at social media, that’s probably in part because people think of their friends as audiences when posting. Certain scholars describe social-media posts as falling somewhere in between interpersonal and mass communication. (They call it “masspersonal.”) Research has also shown that when posting, people tend to have an “imagined audience” in mind—which may not always line up with who really sees their posts. Contributing to the blending of the social with the parasocial, many regular people post to their small followings in the style of influencers: They speak directly to the camera (“Hey, guys”), or curate their photo dumps to display just the right blend of playful, cool effortlessness.
Of course, that’s if they post at all. Recently, in The New Yorker, the critic Kyle Chayka argued that society is experiencing “posting ennui” now that the average person’s modest life update will likely get lost in the sauce of a bunch of influencers with ring lights and brand partnerships. In the age of algorithmically driven feeds, when non-influencers post, perhaps their imagined audiences seem smaller than they used to. “If there’s no guarantee that our friends will even see what we post,” Chayka wrote, “then what is the incentive to keep doing it?”
This, in turn, affects how people consume posts. As the ratio shifts toward content that isn’t truly social—and as social media is experienced more as entertainment instead of a place for connection—perhaps, people will be more likely to just tune in and zone out rather than bothering to interact with the friends they do still see there. “My gut tells me that that expectation that the audience responds has plummeted,” Jeffrey A. Hall, a communications professor at the University of Kansas, told me. So it would make sense that “any gains we used to get from that amount of small interaction in the social-media stream also go away.” Although researchers aren’t yet sure exactly what this phenomenon means for relationships, Hall said that he considers it “part of the long sunset of the public social network as being the place where we see sociality.”
Meanwhile, the sun is rising on the group chat, where a similar flattening and convergence can happen. WhatsApp has been growing in popularity; more people have gotten into Discord. All of these messages crowd home screens alongside breaking news, advertisements, social-media likes, and push alerts. “We’re straddling a bunch of different spheres of our life with these notifications,” Taylor told me. My notification center shows texts from my family group chat next to a bunch of New York Times push alerts, a calendar reminder for a meeting I had earlier today, announcements of new episodes of several podcasts I follow, and multiple ads from DoorDash suggesting that I order from Chick-fil-A, Walgreens, and other stores.
The decampment to group texts is a positive development for connection in some ways. Private messaging platforms, research suggests, lend themselves to sharing more personal content than algorithm-driven spaces, and they are good at facilitating continuous conversations. Yet their rise could erode the norm of reciprocity a little, too. Back in 2018, I wrote a story about how ignoring texts had been normalized, since the medium lets you respond to messages in your own time (or not at all). Group chats may make responding seem even less mandatory, because of the diffused responsibility of having several people in the conversation. At the same time, the more people who are in the conversation, the more that “broadcasting” dynamic can creep in, Taylor said.
Another way private messages have gotten somewhat broadcast-y is the popularity of voice notes. Many people like them because they offer more intimacy than texting but still don’t require an immediate, or any, response from the other person, as a phone call would. But let’s be real—voice notes are essentially little podcasts that you record for your friends. They are acts of connection, but ones that are more of a performance than picking up the phone and calling would be. And performance is always at least a bit distancing.
My best theory to sum all of this up is that a trickle-down effect is happening: As social media starts to look more like entertainment, private messaging starts to look more like social media. (You can “like” and “heart” text messages now, for instance.) In both cases, the performing and consuming elements get dialed up, leading to a subtle blurring of communities with audiences, of communication with content.
The researchers I spoke with haven’t drawn any conclusions about the blurring of relationships with consumable content—technology changes quickly, and scientific studies are slow. But as phoneworld evolves and our relationships contort in response, the psychology professor Linda Kaye of Edge Hill University, in England, offered me a foundational principle to hold on to: “Connection over content is always going to be better.” Your phone wants your attention; your relationships need it.
The post When Real Relationships Start to Look Parasocial appeared first on The Atlantic.
