“Private life is now more than ever lived in public.”
“... we live under the illusion of ‘being connected.”’
Have you ever been infatuated with the life of someone you do not know?
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Have you ever been so invested in someone’s life that you know an obscene amount of their personal life?
Well, let me tell you, you are not alone.
Let me introduce you to parasocial relationships.
Is this a game or a place to find true love?
I am going to go with the first one. But not only is it a game between the contestants, but also a game for the viewers.
I vividly remember sitting on my couch with my best home friend. Ben Higgins was the Bachelor at the time and we both thought he was so cute and thought we knew him better than everyone else.
Realistically, we had no idea who he was other than what he told us on air. The final two contestants were JoJo Fletcher and Lauren Bushnell.
We both kept going back and forth on who he was going to ultimately propose to based on how the episodes were strategically illustrated and aired.
Finally the finale was set to telecast.
We curled up and snuggled under the blankets and had a bowl of fresh popped, buttered popcorn at our fingertips.
Throughout the episode we both thought he was going to choose Fletcher especially when they would show the two of them together. Then when they showed him and Bushnell our opinions immediately changed.
When the last commercial break came around we both put in our final predictions. I thought Fletcher was going to leave with a ring on her finger and my best friend thought the opposite.
The first limo showed up and shockingly JoJo got out of the car. This meant he was about to break up with her. (The first person to get out of the limo is the one who is always sent home). I was pissed. I was so upset for JoJo and I was annoyed that my best friend was right. In my opinion, JoJo and Ben were so much more in love than Lauren and Ben.
Reflecting back on this event, I only thought they had stronger chemistry because of the footage that they showed the public. When Lauren walked up to Ben and he got on one knee, I informed my friend that this relationship was not going to last and that Ben had just made a mistake. We ended up getting in a bit of an argument as she thought I was just being bitter and I thought she was just happy she had correctly guessed.
Now, JoJo is in such a happy long term relationship and Ben and Lauren are no longer together. In the end, we were both wrong, but we thought we had inside information to these personal relationships to accurately predict who was going to end up with who and if it would last a lifetime.
My mind began to unravel as I thought about what these relationships really are and who I feel that I know and have a connection with. There are a lot of people that I feel I know, even if they do not know me, but these relationships I describe below really are the ones that stick out to me and continue to on an everyday basis.
It was the fall of 2018, my freshman year at the University of Michigan. I had seen many ads and trailers for a new show that was premiering called A Million Little Things.
I had never really been invested in fictional television. I would try and start and at each episode I would find myself more devoted to my phone or I would wake up to a completely different season. For some reason, fictional television just never could grasp my attention span.
In my shoebox of a dorm room, I cuddled up in my twin size bed and logged into ABC on my computer to give A Million Little Things a chance. Surprisingly, I found myself engaged and wanting to keep watching. I watched for about four weeks until my schedule and other shows such as The Bachelor and Manifest consumed all my time. It was time to say goodbye to A Million Little Things as it just was not on my priority list.
Fast forward to the summer of 2021 where my time was devoted to studying for the Law School Admission Test (LSAT) and working on the campaign of Malcolm Kenyatta, a young male running for US Senate. I found myself craving an opportunity to watch something where I could escape; I wanted to be ingrained into a new world in which I did not have to actively participate, but could if I wanted to.
I knew that I had enjoyed A Million Little Things three years prior and I did not stop watching because of a lack of interest, but rather because of time restraints. I decided I was going to give it another go.
It was not long before I was binge watching. Every second I had, you would find me under the blankets watching this drama.
Soon after the binge watching began, I fell in love with two characters: Gary Mendez and Maggie Bloom. Not to give too much away, but they met in a group for Breast Cancer survivors and shortly after they were an item - boyfriend and girlfriend. I became obsessed with each of them and I am not quite sure why. They just had a special connection to me as a couple and as individuals.
At one point in the show, their romantic relationship breaks apart, and as they both explore other people, I find myself constantly rooting for them to get back together.
Even though their new respective partners did nothing wrong or a reason for a viewer to not like them, I strongly dislike both because all I want is for Maggie and Gary to end up together. I developed this hatred toward these two other characters and always wanted something bad to happen to them so that their relationship would end and ultimately Gary and Maggie would end up together.
But even as individuals, I love them. I feel Gary’s personality is something that I seek in a partner and it makes him all that more attractive and special to me. Maggie is just a pure sweetheart who is always trying to help others, which is someone I want to be like.
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As a Philadelphia native, I was born to love all Philadelphia sports teams and only Philadelphia sports teams. The Philadelphia Eagles; The Philadelphia 76ers; The Philadelphia Phillies; The Philadelphia Flyers.
From a young age, I had the opportunity to see these games live and it did not take long for me to fall in love with all the sports, but especially with the Flyers, our hockey team. I loved the intensity of the players slamming into each other against the glass, the constant back and forth and the rapidness of the game. I always recognized the names of the players, but one person’s story took my breath away and I began following his life.
Oskar Lindblom.
In December of 2019, while having the season of his career, Lindblom got the hardest news one can receive: he was diagnosed with Ewing's Sarcoma which is a fast paced cancer that develops in your bones and around the tissue of your bones. At the age of 24, he was no longer competing to win a national championship, he was competing for his life. As Ewing’s Sarcoma is a rapidly spreading cancer, one of the most common treatment plans is amputation. Facing this reality, not only did he have to digest the cancer diagnosis, but he also had to contemplate that he may never be able to return to the rink again.
Originally from Sweden, Lindblom received his chemotherapy from the University of Pennsylvania hospital. His teammates wore shirts that said #Oskarstrong under their uniforms each game. I followed this story from the day it became public. On July 2, 2020, Lindblom was able to ring the bell signifying that he had beat cancer. Oskar said that ringing the bell was “probably the best feeling of my life.”
From this, I began following him on Instagram and stalking his girlfriend, Alma Lindqvist, and his dog, Tage, a mini dachshund. To this day, I still follow him and look for him during his games. I look up to him as an inspiration even though so many others have to battle this deadly disease. I feel like as a Philadelphian, his strength and courage warped me into his life and now I engage with him on a daily basis.
Even though these relationships sound so personal and so focused on our generation one may think that older generations may not experience this, but there is actually credibility that this phrase has been around for quite some time.
The term parasocial relationships originated in 1956 by Donald Horton and R. Richard Wohl which describes a one-sided relationship and can give off the illusion that the person, or lets call it an actor, is privately and actively engaging with the audience, you (Horton & Wohl, 1956). The audience is able to choose who they want to have their relationships with and are able to terminate these relationships whenever they would like.
With the rise and dependency on social media, it has become easier to follow aspects of actors' lives, even if it is private.
While the rise of television and social media has definitely made these relationships more common and easier to engage with, people were committed to these relationships before. In fact, people developed these relationships with political figures, Gods and Spirits. Almost everyone has at least one of these parasocial relationships, whether it be with a fictional character or a well known celebrity.
Originally it was thought that people who were in a parasocial relationship were lonely, isolated, pathological, and had social anxieties. Today, it is known to be healthy (for the most part), can sometimes be some of our most important relationships, and can help shape our own personal identity.
Not everyone will form these relationships for the same reasons; some may enter these relationships as a way to escape their reality; others may get joy out of it; others may use it as a cognitive development benefit and how to better themselves in different aspects of life; others may use it a therapeutic approach to re-living good moments in their life that they can reconnect with as someone else goes through something similar.
I completely agree with the conception that people develop these parasocial relationships for many different reasons. As you have read, I developed my own personal parasocial relationships for different reasons.
I am happy to see that the experts have basically ruled out that people form these relationships because they feel isolated or experience social anxieties. With so much exposure to social media and different forms of media in general, it is so normal and expected that people are going to establish these relationships. It would be really alarming if everyone still thought that parasocial relationships were bad because it would be an indicator that most people in the world would have some form of feeling isolated, experiencing social anxieties, or even becoming pathological.
There are some different terms that fall under the bigger umbrella of parasocial relationships.
A parasocial interaction is when a person is actively watching something and then physically engaging themself. One example of this would be if you start screaming at the television when the football team you root for just gave up an interception. Sports fans, I know you can relate.
A parasocial relationship is when you think about these people when you are not actively watching them; you think about them in your spare time.
A parasocial attachment is when you feel the need to become close with someone you do not know on a personal level just to feel more comfortable in your own skin.
Like I mentioned before, parasocial relationships are typically healthy, except for those rare cases. One example of this when a parasocial relationship became dangerous was when John Hinckley Jr. had an obsession and truly believed that he was in a relationship with Jodie Foster. Genuinely thinking that he was in a real-life relationship with Foster, he shot President Ronald Reagan. While this type of behavior is unlikely to occur, it definitely is worth mentioning because people sometimes take it too far.
This project really allowed me to look in the mirror at my own personal social media use and my own relationships, but I also wanted to learn more about other peoples experiences. Learning about others' stories really helped me to feel confident with everything that I was discovering about myself and how much I truly hate social media.
As I began investigating parasocial relationships and delving deeper into social media, reading other peoples stories and experiences with social media only led me to think about my own. One question continued to wander through my mind: why do I even engage with social media?
I absolutely hate social media; I hate everything about it, yet I am so addicted. I feel as though I am the victim of a drug addiction and I am doing everything in my power to stop, but the high that I get from scrolling through my feed just won’t budge.
I go on Instagram and I see girls with perfect bodies; I go on Snapchat and see that that one girl who is in the best relationship just put on her story the cutest picture of her and her boyfriend; I go on Twitter and see that the smartest boy in my math class tweeted about having the worst day ever.
But when I reach out to these people and their friends, their real life tells a completely different narrative. The girl whose body I dreamt of having is actually suffering from a severe eating disorder which has put her inpatient many times. The relationship I yearn to have is actually nothing like the way it is portrayed; they fight everyday and are more on and off than flickering lights. The smartest boy in my math class who I assumed had a bad day because he did not get a 102% on the midterm actually was just diagnosed with cancer.
But why do these people fall in the same rabbit hole as me? Why did they feel the need to post the things they did? I cannot assume that I know exactly why they did it, but I can explain why I post, and I am pretty confident that their reasons are more or less similar to mine. It is quite simple: we do not post for ourselves, we post for others, for our followers. I want my followers to see the trendy outfit I wore out, or the cool new restaurant I tried, or the exotic places I am fortunate enough to visit. If I was posting this content for myself, I would not need to post it in the first place. I could make an album on my computer or a photobook.
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As I continue to reflect on my own experiences, the stories that others have shared are constantly replaying in the back of my mind the way a song stuck in your head does.
One in particular: Carmella de los Angeles Guiol.
She saw through Instagram that one of her friends was away on a family vacation in France. From the pictures, everything looked absolutely magical and perfect. When she reached out to her friend to find out more about the trip, she was in shock to find out the reality.
Her friend broke down and mentioned that she was sick and fought with her family for a considerable amount of the trip. This led Camella to reflect on her own life and she took a year off of social media.
The results of her small experiment are nothing that she could have imagined.
Frightened that her departure from social media would affect her relationships, she found that her friendships were strengthened because neither party could rely on social media updates, so it forced them to reach out more if they wanted to be up to date in each other's lives. Through these text exchanges, she discovered that her conversations were more in depth and her and her friends would talk more about the experiences. Camella describes social media as “keeping in touch without any of the legwork.” This statement could not be more accurate. The things posted on social media give us a shallow look at someone’s life and only through the lens at which it is shown. You think that you are caught up with one’s life because that is the perception we obtain. Yet, we really are not; we are able to see the physical part of what one chooses to post, but we have no access to the emotional part unless we go one step further and are in a direct one-to-one conversation.
By not having social media for a year, when Camella’s friends reached out to her, it was intentional. Some people may just swipe up or comment on a social media post, but that could be accidental or to just seem interested. Here, her friends had to continuously and purposely reach out to find out about her life. This leave of absence ended up creating stronger relationships that were only superficial on the internet.
At the end of the day, true friendships do not depend on social media to survive, and if you find yourself losing relationships because you are inactive on social media, you should think, was this a real friendship?
After reading Camella’s story I really wanted to observe my personal behavior on social media. I finally came to the realization that social media destroys us; we change the way we actually look and we do not do it for ourselves which in all honesty is really sad. We have been taught to live our own life and be our own person and differences should be celebrated, so why do we not act this way on social media?
Over the Halloween weekend of 2021 I returned home for a quick break. It was the first time I had some down time for more than 20 minutes since I returned to campus in mid August.
Most nights that I went out at school I felt the need to post a story. I wanted it to be known that I was going out to all my “friends” on Snapchat and I needed to get the perfect selfie with the right lighting, from the best angle and with the filter that would cover up all my blemishes. This last weekend in October, though, allowed me to take a personal sabbatical from social media.
While it was not nearly as long as Camella's, and I did not completely delete the apps, I did not post. I felt relieved. I felt good. I felt like I could actually enjoy myself without being focused on how I looked just for others to see and probably not look at for more than two seconds.
At home, I also did not check on my social media accounts as often as I do at school. I am starting to come to the realization that social media is a fraud. Just as Madison Malone Kircher said about John Mulaney, “You know his comedy. You know his persona. The version of Mulaney he selectively offers you at the mic.” This rings true for me and you too. Unless you have a real relationship with somebody and connect with them at a much deeper level, you are only showing your followers or your “friends” the person that they want to see or the person you think they want to see.
It is not really you.
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One aspect of parasocial relationships, the central theme in Chris Rojek’s book, is presumed intimacy. As audience members we feel as though we are entitled to inside information of the lives of certain actors. Even though this information is typically made public we assume that we have an in with this person and therefore are more intimate with them. Thus, in addition to presumed intimacy, we also experience notions of presumed assumptions.
Based on the information that is shared to us, our minds tend to create this story of how we see a person or how we would like to see a person.
During the 2020-2021 school year all of my classes were remote, held on Zoom, and I would presume that this rings true for you as well. With a little square as the only access to peers and professors faces, we subconsciously made assumptions about these people. One may have drawn conclusions about one’s height, weight, laziness (based on whether someone would take their classes laying in bed with pajamas still on), and academic status (whether or not they are good students). The list goes on and on and really any person has the ability to imagine and speculate different details about an individual far beyond the ones mentioned.
In one of my remote classes, I had made assumptions about the professor just based on the face in the small box I saw. I expected that this teacher would have been average height with an average weight. Fast forward to the fall semester of 2021 where I would be enrolled in another class with this professor, the only difference being that class was in-person. To my surprise, this professor was a lot taller than I had anticipated and a lot skinnier. Coming into this class with a strict preconceived notion of the professor really opened my eyes to how common we engage, aware or not, in these presumed assumptions and intimacies.
It is amazing how by really investing my time into this project, I am more and more aware of how common all of this really occurs.
For one of the clubs I am a part of we all have at least one partner. After being assigned with this person, the first thing I thought to do was look her up on social media to see what she looked like and find out any other background information right away.
To be completely honest, I think this is creepy that we can look up anyone at any time with our fingertips.
If I knew I was going to meet this girl in person, why could I not just wait to ask her these basic questions? I think the answer to this question is that this is so normalized and instilled in modern society that it would be weirder if I had not looked her up at all.
Back to the story. I searched this girl up on Instagram and she was on public meaning that even though I did not follow her I could still look at all her pictures. Looking through her pictures, this girl had an ideal body and looked like a really cool girl. A couple weeks later I met up with this girl in person and if you told me that was the same girl on Instagram I would have laughed in your face. These two people looked nothing alike, yet it was the same person. This girl was so much more chill than what her Instagram portrayed. I had the impression that this was going to be some spoiled girl who got whatever she wanted, whenever. But when I met her she could not have been more opposite.
Social media is so dangerous in that we come to conclusions based on false beliefs about what someone will be like and until we meet them in person we just assume our assumptions are correct.
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These interactions happen even more frequently because social media has allowed everyone to become a public figure.
With the ability to be public on certain platforms such as Twitter and Instagram, accept the people who want to follow you, and the convenience of live streaming on these platforms, anyone and everyone qualifies as a public figure.
The way pictures are posted with the capacity to edit how you would like, social media is encouraging all consumers to act as public figures. With the increased number of public figures, it is more common than ever to be in a parasocial relationship, and unbeknownst to you, people may have a parasocial relationship with you.
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Let’s take a look at a typical college student.
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Michigan was her dream school, and the cool September air welcomed her to the city of Ann Arbor, which was dominated by the colors Maize and Blue. This girl had a very normal, fortunate childhood. She grew up in North Jersey with her mother, father, older sister, and dog, worked hard for good grades, and participated in a wide array of extracurricular activities.
Getting acclimated to this new environment and adjusting to living on her own, she decided she wanted to rush a sorority. It was the fall semester of 2018 and late October was approaching. Everyone was trying to figure out what to wear for Halloween as this was a week-long thing, a foreign concept to the Freshman, like me, who thought it would be one night.
A couple weeks prior, she had returned home for fall break. Just like almost everyone else, she had a typical cold which was probably due to the fact that her immune system was not used to college life. When she returned to campus, her cold was not getting better or staying the same; it was getting worse, quickly.
She ended up going to University Health Services (UHS) and they recommended that she be seen at the hospital. The ER doctor had advised her that she had pneumonia and prescribed her some medications and she was on her way back to her dorm.
Two days later, things were looking really bad. The medication was not doing anything. She could not stop coughing, and was too weak to attend her classes. Once again, she was on her way to the hospital. This time the diagnosis was double pneumonia.
No medicine the doctors were giving her was working, even the strongest ones. They had reached the conclusion that it would be best to put her in a medically induced coma.
However, four days later as they tried to wake her, she would not wake up. As her body functioned only by the Life Support machine, no one knew what was happening.
Days came and went. She was still unconscious.
A week and a half later, the doctors told her family that they should start rounding up the people she would want to say goodbye to her. There was basically no hope.
Family and friends began to book airfare and this magical fairytale of coming to the University of Michigan was turning out to be a real nightmare.
Eight hours after this traumatizing conversation the doctors had with her family, her eyes began to open, her body started moving more, and she finally said a word: “when is the Penn State vs. Michigan game?”
Clearly, she had no idea what had happened and no idea that the Penn State vs. Michigan game occurred ten days prior.
It was a miracle that she woke up. It was later found that her body shut down to a variety of different things happening at once. She had a strain of Covid (before Covid-19 was even a thing), double pneumonia, the flu, and a viral infection. Her body just could not fight it all off.
After waking up, the hospital kept her hooked up to all the machines for another 48 hours. After the machines that once ran her body were removed, she was under their care for an additional four days.
When she was discharged, everything basically went back to normal. She obviously had to see doctors to make sure different systems in her body were working properly, but two months later, you would have never known.
Nothing on her social media accounts would have hinted that anything was wrong, so if you did not personally know her and what was going on, you would have thought, she too, was just taking a break from social media.
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It is crazy how social media continues to give off the wrong impression and how people use it to depict themselves in a certain way.
On a Saturday in November, the evening of College Gameday, the Michigan Wolverines took on the Indiana Hoosiers in Ann Arbor. With a home game comes tailgates and lots of drunk college students repping Maize and Blue.
Well, one of my friends exceeded her limits and we were approximately 30 seconds away from taking her to the hospital. She finally was able to form cohesive words and the seven of us decided that a hospital trip was not a necessity.
After waking up extremely dehydrated with a pounding headache, my friend decided she was going to post on Instagram some of the pictures she had taken before becoming obliterated. She posted these pictures in which she looked completely sober and seemed like she had an amazing gameday.
Unless you were one of us, the ones taking care of her, you would think she had a great normal gameday. Again, and I do not think this can be stressed enough even if I just copied and pasted this a million times, but what is on social media does not explain a person in their entirety or properly illustrate an event or experience. If you truly want to know about it, contact them.
“In most human relationships we develop emotional attachments as we become more literate with a person’s conditions of life and character…. With pixillated strangers emotional involvement is urged to precede cultural literacy.”
“Achieved celebrities were not merely understood to be glamorous, talented individuals. They began to operate as informal life coaches providing the crowd with invaluable pointers to how attitudes, grooming, forms of presentation and types of ambition could breach the walls of ascribed culture.”
Through study, it has become more and more evident to how common parasocial relationships really are.. Literally once a day something would remind me of parasocial relationships. Even my friends who had no idea what I was even working on would make comments pertaining to parasocial relationships and I knew this was the perfect opportunity to show that this is not just a me thing.
Growing up in the 2000s exposed my generation to media and technology at a very young age. Everyone has that one television show that they were obsessed with as a child - mine was the Wiggles.
One of my friends is constantly talking about Spencer Shay. Yes, the iCarly character.
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I knew that she would be the perfect person to interview about her parasocial relationship with him.
To begin, she noted “I am obsessed with Spencer Shay because he makes me laugh. I only have positive associations with him.” Even though people have different reasons for developing parasocial relationships, it is very common for people to develop them because of these positive attributes and the way it makes them feel.
When asked if she felt connected to him, she responded, “Yes, I do. I feel connected to him because we have a similar sense of humor. We do similar things to make others laugh.” Again, this is another common example of why people develop parasocial relationships; she feels a connection with him; She feels they resemble one another.
In addition to having a connection with him and that he makes her laugh, I asked her why do you like him. She proceeded to tell me “I like him because with everyone I know, I have seen a negative side, but with Spencer I have only seen positivity radiate out of him.” She then related this back to her life, “when I know I want to be positive, I mimic him. But I also know he is a fictional character and life is not that positive.”
She also brought up that Spencer Shay resembles the three most important males in her life: her dad, her lifelong best friend Johnny, and her older brother figure who she has grown up with, Paul.
Even though she has been obsessed with Spencer since she grew up watching iCarly, she has a newfound appreciation for him. She notes “ as I am older and facing harder times in life, I know I have him to look back on.”
And of course, she follows him on Instagram and searches his name on Google extremely frequently.
And like everyone else who has a parasocial relationship with Shay, she knows him best because she keeps up with his life and researches him. She even DMs him even though he does not respond.
I had the opportunity to talk to one of my other friends about their parasocial relationship with a contestant on the show Love Island, Toby. Love Island is a show about finding love with games intertwined.
I asked my friend what about Toby makes you like him so much. To that she responded, “watching Love Island this year, he reminds me of what I would want in a dream husband. He is funny and hot, very positive, knows what he wants, and is not afraid to take risks which are all things I admire.”
I followed up and asked if she thought Love Island portrayed his true personality well. She followed him during the season airing so she answered by saying, “he acts the same on Instagram as he did on Love Island so I think it is a good portrayal of his personality.” I then questioned her by asking if she thought Instagram was a true indicator of someone and she noted she believed that Instagram stories are a better portrayal than Instagram posts.
Then I wanted to know whether she felt she knew him and she said, “I feel like I know him as a person because I watched him live so I know it is not fictional.” (I should probably have a talk with her and explain how scripted a lot of these shows truly are).
When asking whether or not she was friends with him she responded by saying, “I do not think we are friends because he never answered my DM, but if we were friends we would understand each other because we are very similar. We are similar because he is funny, risk taking and very blunt.”
She felt that they were similar because for one of the challenges they had to take care of a doll pretending it was a baby and Toby named it something unusual which is something that she said she would do too. Who knows if the producer told him to say the weird name. Probably.
Even though she is in love with Toby, she is more obsessed with his relationship and his current girlfriend so she does not want to intervene and break them up (because she would have the power to do that, I forgot!!!!) so instead asked if they could be cousins.
Parasocial relationships are weird. Really weird.
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Parasocial relationships come in all different forms as you hopefully have been able to see. But recently people have taken their parasocial relationships in a different direction: being detectives. People felt as though they could solve the disappearance and then murder of Gabby Petito and locate Brian Laundrie.
How am I supposed to feel comfortable with people trying to solve the Gabby Petito case the same way people treat their parasocial relationships? Not this many people are obsessed with true crime; these people are just obsessed with parasocial relationships.
The fall semester of 2021 brought students back to the atmosphere they knew before the world was turned upside down by the Covid-19 pandemic. Most classes were in person, college football games returned, and there was actually life on the college campuses, something that was absent last year.
While students and parents were getting back in the groove, Gabby Petito went missing. If I had mentioned her name in August, I can confidently say that I bet none of you had heard her name. Fast forward to the middle of September and I do not think one person would not know the story behind Gabby Petito.
Petito and her fiance Brian Laundrie went on a road trip and he returned home without her. It became known that her Instagram was active, but her parents had not heard from her and the most recent text messages that they received did not seem like it was written by Petito.
Well it did not take long before people realized it was not Petito, and Laundrie went silent. In addition to his silence, he disappeared into thin air and could not be found. This is when the public, people like me and you, became infatuated with this case. Where was Laundrie and where was Petito?
A couple weeks after the obsession began, Petito’s remains were found, but there was still no sign of Laundrie. People were livid, and they had every right to be because the police took their eyes off the prize.
I have always been a true crime fanatic and I can confidently say that I have never seen the media and the public so invested in a singular case the way I saw with this case. This could have been because she was a YouTube blogger and people had followed her and had parasocial relationships with her. They felt that they were connected to her life one way or another.
But it is weird. Because most of these people who were trying to solve this case and locate Laundrie did not know either one at all. Yet, they believed they did. They thought that they were smarter than the police and the FBI and would have private information that would lead detectives to securing the location of Laundrie.
Everytime I opened my phone and went on the TikTok app my entire For You Page (FYP) was dominated by people telling the story of Gabby Petito. I swear that every 2 out of 3 videos was a young adult probably in their early 20s trying to solve this case. Speculating and analyzing everything.
I have absolutely no problem with people conveying information through social media, but I do have an issue when people, especially people who have no level of experience with this type of work or have any relationship with these people, try to take on this case.
If anyone could solve a murder case, then we would not need law enforecement and other agencies to complete this work. But we do have these programs because not everyone can solve these cases.
At the end of the day, Laundrie was eventually found dead from a self-inflicted gunshot wound, and it was not you or me who found his body or solved the case. It was the FBI and law enforcement.
In the end, people became fascinated with this murder mystery. The public felt that they knew her and could be the detective in the case. It is just so abnormally normal that people have these types of relationships even with victims of horrific crimes.
Parasocial relationships are real. They are weird. They are abnormally normal.
There has been a lot of discussion about parasocial relationships and how you may interact with different people. You may have just discovered that you too engage in these relationships. Don’t worry. It is okay.
Social media has clearly become an integral part of society; it definitely has made communication easier and more accessible. But while important news stories have traveled more rapidly than ever before, our relationships are more superficial and not as meaningful as they once were… aka before cell phones legit became attached to our hips.
Social media is not the issue. There is absolutely nothing wrong with finding out information on social media. There is really not that much wrong with parasociality. The issue is when parasociality and social media intertwine with one another. This becomes dangerous. Social media forces parasociality onto nonparasocial relationships. For example, friends become followers and followers become our friends and we become fans of our friendships and this is where it becomes bad. Social media confuses social relationships by dragging in parasocial components.
There is also the issue of the doubling effect. We know an actual person and then we know the person they want to be on social media. I absolutely despise this. Why do we have to be different people when we are on social media? It is the dumbest thing I have ever seen. Are we trying to impress people we do not know? And if we do end up meeting these people aren’t they going to end up seeing what we look like and what our personality is really like? Who cares how many followers you have or how many likes you get on an Instagram post. But just know it is okay to be true to yourself and to your followers. Understand where you stand.
At the end of the day, true friendships do not come down to this. Social media forces us to treat our friends that we follow the same way we treat the strangers we follow. So it just forces us all to have this really weird relationship with one another even if we do not know this person on any level.
At this point we cannot go back in time to prevent this; we can only go forward. We just need to be aware of this. If we were to change something that would have an effect, the entire internet culture would be so different and society as whole would not look the same. But being cognizant of this is all we can do and being aware may help us not let this issue get worse.
I decided in the past year, but more specifically starting in summer 2021 that I really hate social media. I hate that people edit their pictures or they want to post at the right time to get the most amount of likes. I am a senior in college and I have learned that there are a lot more important things in life than getting 500 likes on Instagram. If I am being completely honest, no one else cares so why should I. I feel so much better about myself and feel that my life does not depend on social media. I truly, truly feel this way and believe that you would feel the same too. Give it a shot and your real relationships will become more defined and personalized. It will not be about pleasing your audience. It will be about pleasing yourself. We all need to do this a little more in life.
I have become happier as I no longer care about the amount of likes I receive on an Instagram post. I no longer post on social media for other people; I post for myself. I challenge you to do the same.
Here is your step one.
