Parasocial media: why influencers really aren't your friend

An essay version of the video is below.

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Overview #

The “parasocial” illusion that’s created by social media platforms helps deceive and misguide you, the audience.

Video #

Audio #

Why influencers really aren't your friend

Download audio

Parasocial media #

Those people aren’t your friends.

By those people I mean social media influencers and similarly popular accounts on your preferred social media platform. Obviously online friendships are real. I’ve based my entire career on the relationships I’ve built online. None of my work over the past 25 years would have happened without the mutual connections that you can build on the various social media networks. And those friendships are as real, as rewarding, as the ones I’ve formed in “real life”.

They might possibly be better because I have a problem with eye contact for various neurodivergent reasons. It’s quite a bit easier to communicate with people in text or mediated through a computer in some other way without having to think about looking at their eyes. So I’m hugely grateful to the relationships I’ve built on social media, but that isn’t as much the case with social media today as it was when I started.

I benefit from the fact that the social media experience twenty years ago or even twenty-five years ago, when I first started blogging, is very different from what passes as social media today.

This is a bit of an informal series on how the design of social media – the technical side, the media design, the format of it – affects the way we get our information.

I first covered the limitations of short-form video like TikTok. There are plenty of limitations to the form, but I focused specifically on the length and how that forces you to use editing to create an impression of an argument, as opposed to making an actual argument.

In the last essay I focused on the context collapse that exists in most social media, but I focused specifically on text-oriented media such as X, Threads, Bluesky, or Mastodon because on those platforms it destroys our ability to deliver the specialised discourse that is needed to cover difficult topics.

This time, it’s the false promise behind the term we use to label the platforms where we find each other: social media.

Because that’s where things get dicey.

I’m not focusing on anxiety or mental health or similar issues in this series, but instead on how it affects the way we get our information. When it comes to social media the asymmetry that now defines it wasn’t there at the beginning.

The asymmetry I’m referring to is what danah boyd, an academic I’ve referred to before, called the parasocial nature of the current social media networks.

In a recent paper she has argued that these networks have long since ceased to be “social” and are more properly parasocial networks:

To more effectively interrogate what we are witnessing, we need to stop presuming that these tools are “social media” and begin recognizing that they are now “parasocial media.” Doing so raises new questions about digitally mediated sociality, not to mention the politics and governance of these platforms.

Many social interactions on these sites have become largely an illusion.

They don’t exist to build a symmetrical, two-way relationship between people. They’re there to give you the illusion of interacting with anything ranging from a minor celebrity to a major celebrity. You might talk to somebody on social media who has hundreds of thousands of followers, and you might actually get a reply. But that gives you the sense – the feeling – that you’re in a relationship with them and that there’s a mutual connection between you. But there usually is