Recently, a friend send me some videos on political commentary by a couple of Indian youtubers. They were from youtubers I was already subscribed to, but hadn’t watched too many of their videos lately. I did remember watching a lot more of their content a year ago. I was obsessed with their commentary on the topics around elections and political campaign. I thought I’m becoming more politically aware and gaining a lot of useful knowledge about the system.
Then, after the election, I stopped watching them. No more putting political commentary for every meal I was having at home by myself. It felt familiar to something else. Few years ago, I was obsessed with Chess and chess videos on youtube. I was watching every video that Agadmator would post. It went on for many months until it stopped.
That itself wasn’t new either. I’ve had times when I used to get really invested in tech reviewers, automobile reviewers and many others, watching them for comfort. While one can always claim to be gaining knowledge out of them (making them educational in some sense), there are other ways of learning like reading or taking a course, but I didn’t do any of that. I also didn’t watch other channels. Just a few particular ones. Why was that?
All of that made me think about parasocial relationships.
Parasocial relationships
Parasocial relationships are, simply put, what happens when someone obsesses over a celebrity and follow them on different platforms (movies, social media, news etc) leading to the belief that they know the celebrity personally, while the celebrity might not know about this person’s existence. It is an illusion of some form of intimacy felt only by one side.
It doesn’t have to be a celebrity in 2025. It can be an online influencer, a gamer or just a news reporter. The point is more about the asymmetric nature of the relationship and the misguided perception of having a companionship of some sort where there is none.
Earlier in human evolution, anyone you saw or heard about multiple times every day was likely a friend, neighbor or family member. It was natural to feel like their well being is important to you, and that they care about you just as much as you do about them. With advent of media such as books, newspapers and, importantly, internet social networks like twitter and youtube, it was possible to get a level of exposure to strangers (who often have no idea about our existence) that we get of our family or friends, arguably even more.
The internet has a split opinion on the extent of useful and harmful patterns that emerge out of parasocial relationships. On one hand, they may help people feel less lonely by extending their ‘friends circle’ to imaginary / fictional friends and even make some of us more empathetic. But on the other hand, is it okay to indulge in these forms of connections knowing they’re exploiting a weakness in the human mind? Wouldn’t that be manipulation on part of the people who then recommend us products to buy or to pay to be able to access their more “premium content”?
I’m uncertain how it affects humanity as a whole. All I know is, it costs me a lot of time without many gains in return. I have a more than healthy social circle that I don’t need to complement it with parasocial relationships, and the time spent “maintaining” these relationships is too big of a price to pay for what my mom would just call wasting time on the internet (very rightly so).
In closing
I’ve stopped following youtube channels religiously. I do spend my fair share of time on social media, but generally just like to search for something, and then watch it. I think it is healthier than to become a fan, or something more extreme. I also think it applies tangentially to other aspects of life where we obsess over the person rather than the thing they’re producing or standing for, like politicians, professors, musicians and so on. This, in my opinion, leads to all sorts of strange things like people voting for the person rather than the policies proposed by the political party they represent. I think we can do better than that.
Thank you for reading.