Parasocial Relationships

Human beings have been able to take photos for about 200 years, and we have been able to record and broadcast video for about 100 years now, but access to both of these technologies in their nascence was heavily restricted by means. In effect you needed to be wealthy to use either technology. It was 1839 when the first consumer camera came to market at a cost of around $7,000 in today's money. The pursuit of photography as accessible to the everyday consumer did not emerge until the 20th century. It was also during this time several decades later that the first consumer camcorders came to market which similarly carried a high price of entry before later falling to a more affordable level.

It was really in the 1980s when consumer electronics experienced an explosion in popularity that most people will have bought their first cameras and camcorders that were intended to be kept and reused. Even with access to this technology growing it wasn't until around the early 2000s with the rise of camera phones predating smart phones that a similar explosion in photography happened, later amplified by the emergence of the smart phone and much higher quality image processing.

At a similar point in history, in 2005 a little site named YouTube popped up online and with it came the democratisation of video distribution. Anyone with a camera could record video and upload it to the internet for the whole world to see. This marked a turning point for all of mankind because it serves as the point in our evolution where we could regularly see video of people we knew but could not see in person, as well as people we did not know.

It has only been within the last 18 years then as a species that we have regularly consumed content depicting moving images of real people that we can develop a social connection to and sustain over time. This point is important to make because it underlines this entire conversation.

In terms of your physiology, your eyes see 2D images of the world they do not see in 3D. Your brain takes 2 images one from each eye with a slightly different perspective and combines them to create a 3D interpretation of the world. Your perception of this third dimension is entirely in your head and entirely the result of your brain processing these images. Your brain can't tell the difference between a photo and the a real object, you rely on context to know the difference and rely upon indicators such as lighting, colour, and the shape of the image as it reacts to your physical movement. You need to move in order to know something is flat.

To demonstrate this concept in the extreme, if you were to stand in a fixed point and observe a 50 foot balloon currently 200 feet away from you, then take that balloon and move it towards you whilst deflating it in synchronisation, you would not be able to perceive its movement. As the size reduces and it moves towards you, to your mind it would be fixed in point. The video game Superliminal plays with this concept by allowing you to manipulate the size of objects depending on your perspective and demonstrates how you are unable to perceive size and depth without movement.

If you've ever played a VR game where you walk across a plank 100 storeys high you'll understand this inability to tell the difference between images and reality quite intimately. Consciously you know it's not real, physiologically you still react as if it is, because on a base level you can't tell the difference, you are relying on context for clues and in the case of VR an active effort is made to remove as many contextual points of reference as possible, through headsets that obscure your vision and earphones that obscure your spatial awareness.

Human beings have been around for millions of years, it is only within the last 20 years that we have regularly consumed content depicting real people living normal lives engaging with an audience as if they were in the same room. To expect humans beings to evolve in the space of 20 years and override millions of years of evolutionary programming is asinine.

Parasocial relationships have their problems, but to judge people who develop them as abnormal is obtuse. If you're regularly consuming content from an individual and not developing any emotional attachment to that individual then you're the outlier not the people who do. There are a number of neurodiverse conditions that prevent emotional connections with individuals you don't engage with physically. This is an indication of Alexithymia, which in itself is present in around 50% - 85% of individuals who fall into the range of Autism Spectrum Disorders, whilst not in itself an indicator of ASD as there are other reasons it may be present without an ASD diagnosis. The bottom line however is that most people when they see other people, feel an emotional connection to those people, regardless of the medium. A lack of emotional response is an indicator of some underlying condition.

So the next time you see someone who has developed a parasocial relationship and feel the need to judge them, you might want to stop and think about why you don't have an emotional response. If you do have an emotional response and you still judge others for theirs then maybe you're just a cunt.