Social media has made it easier to build more parasocial relationships with celebrities and influencers. What impact are those connections having on our relationships IRL? And how do they shift our understanding and expectations of intimacy and trust?
Florida State University assistant professor Arienne Ferchaud defines parasocial relationships and discusses how new technologies are changing the role of entertainment in our lives.
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The following transcript has been edited for clarity:
Megan Garber: Andrea, growing up, did you have an imaginary friend?
Andrea Valdez: I did. Yeah, I had an imaginary friend whose name I cannot believe I’m gonna tell you. Sorry. I cannot believe—sorry. His name was Barfy.
Garber: Ah! Yes!
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Valdez: I definitely have questioned if this imaginary-friend thing really happened—with a name like Barfy, it feels like it could be a total false memory that someone planted in my head to mess with me. But when it’s come up over the years in conversation with my mom, she said she thinks maybe I was trying to say Barbie.
Garber: Do you have any memory of how he came to be? Or what he looked like?
Valdez: No, I don’t remember any of that. I just think I was too young to form any real coherent memories about him. My brother is six years older than me, and so I kind of wonder if I made up a friend because I was lonely when he went off to elementary school. And so Barfy wasn’t “real” but was real company, and I think I needed that type of connection for some real reason.
Garber: Yes, definitely. RIP, Barfy.
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Valdez: I’m Andrea Valdez. I’m an editor at The Atlantic.
Garber: And I’m Megan Garber, a staff writer at The Atlantic.
Valdez: This is How to Know What’s Real.
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Valdez: Megan, I know you’ve been writing about technology and culture for a long time at The Atlantic, but I feel like in these last few years, you’ve really been focused on thinking about truth and fiction.
Garber: Uh-huh; yeah.
Valdez: I mean, you wrote an article last year called “We’re Already Living in the Metaverse.”
Garber: [Laughter.] Welcome.
Valdez: Tell me more about what you mean by living in the metaverse.
Garber: Yeah. So I’m thinking of the metaverse in part this long-standing dream in the tech world—this hope that, when computers get advanced enough, they can create environments where virtual reality seems less virtual and more reality. And, of course, the tech hasn’t quite caught up to that big vision, but the idea of the metaverse is what we are navigating right now—this idea that one day we’ll be able to immerse ourselves in our entertainment. That’s the world that’s here. It’s just that the immersion isn’t strictly a matter of a single place or platform. Instead, it’s everywhere.
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Valdez: That line between reality and fantasy feels really blurry right now.
Garber: Yes.
Valdez: There’s the really obviously insidious stuff—like, there’s the rise of deepfakes and AI-generated scams. But there are these slightly murkier areas. Like, are content creators on YouTube and social media showing us their authentic selves, or is it really just a performance?
Garber: Yes. And in some ways those are age-old questions, right? People have been thinking about the difference between the performed life and real life, such as it is, for centuries—and millennia, even! But exactly then, like you said, the difference feels hazier now than it’s ever been. And so much of that has to do with technology. I think about the line “All the world’s a stage,” and that used to be a metaphor. But it’s becoming ever more literal.
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Garber: Imaginary friends seem so childlike and so kind of fanciful and fantastical, but it does occur to me that we have versions of them even as adults, right?
Valdez: Totally.
Garber: I’m thinking about, for example, the people on my social media who I follow—and I know in some ways very intimate details about their lives. I know what’s in their medicine cabinets, what they have for breakfast. And of course they know nothing about me. They don’t know even that I exist. Do you have people in your life, Andrea, that you feel connected to in that way?
Valdez: Yeah; I mean, of course. There’s like, a lot of folks that are listening. I listen to several podcasts, and I feel really close to the hosts of those podcasts. And it makes me just feel like I really know them. And like, there’s, like, a couple of running influencers that I follow on Instagram, and one of them just finished the Boston Marathon, and I was so proud of her. [Laughter.] And it’s just really strange to say that, even, because she’s a total stranger.
Garber: [Laughter.]
Valdez: I mean, I guess I can be proud of this relative stranger—but, like, I just knew so much about her ambition and her goals. So yeah; it’s totally weird. And like, with the podcasters—I mean, they’re in my ears every week, so I feel like I have this sort of standing date with them.
Garber: Mmm. Yes. And I think a key thing with all those relationships is that the “friends” you’re describing are real and imaginary at the same time.
Valdez: Huh.
Garber: So they’re relationships, definitely, and they’re giving you a lot of what IRL friendships can. But also the “relation” aspect is so different from what it would be IRL.
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And I wonder: What are those relationships we’re building with these people we don’t really know?
Arienne Ferchaud: A parasocial relationship is essentially this sort of simulated relationship.
Garber: So, Andrea, I talked with Dr. Arienne Ferchaud. She is an assistant professor of communications at Florida State University, and she’s been studying emerging media and especially the feelings of closeness that so many of us get just by watching strangers on a screen—even with something as commonplace as watching the news.
Ferchaud: The news anchor is talking to the screen like they’re talking to you. It sort of simulates a back-and-forth, because they are looking right at you. They might use words like our community, lots of we and us and inclusive language like that. So it simulates kind of a social interaction, but it’s not. It’s actually one-sided.
Garber: Dr. Ferchaud, when did your interest in parasocial relationships really begin?
Ferchaud: Through a series of kind of weird and unfortunate—not unfortunate, really fortunate—events, I wound up having an on-campus job. And at first I wanted something really easy, that I wouldn’t have to, like, do a lot, but all those were taken. [Laughter.] So I wound up as an undergraduate assistant to a professor there by the name of Dr. Meghan Sanders. And we worked on this study related to this character on the TV show House. The character kind of abruptly committed suicide on the show and was gone off the show. This is not a real person. The actor, of course, is fine. But people were really mourning that character.
Garber: Huh.
Ferchaud: He was played by Kal Penn.
Garber: Oh, that’s right; I remember that.
Ferchaud: He left to go work for Obama, and so they killed him off the show. [Laughter.] People actually set up these Facebook pages that were memorial pages. It was virtually indistinguishable from, like, a memorial page you would set up for a friend. Like: “Oh, I’m gonna miss you so much.” Talking directly to the person. But it’s that same sort of idea when that character that we are really fond of is kind of taken away. People really do kind of react like they are just another person that they know.
Garber: I’ve certainly felt that, and—for me as a viewer—it’s a little bit hard to process that feeling. I question the validity, because I know this is fiction. This is fake. Why do I care so much? But, it is a loss!
Ferchaud: It goes back to sort of evolutionary biology and psychology. Essentially, evolution happens over millions of years, right? It takes a long time. But when we think about the history of television, that hasn’t been around that long in the grand scheme of things. I mean, my parents were, like, there when television started. So you kind of have this situation where, consciously, yes: We know this is not real. This character might be dead, but the actor’s fine. But our lizard brains, in a way, don’t really know the difference.
Garber: So do our minds—I mean, like, how do they distinguish even between the sort of factual person and the fictional person? Or is the point that they simply don’t?
Ferchaud: Yeah; on some level, they don’t. Based on what I know about parasocial relationships, I think it’s a matter of closeness to some degree. You know, when my father passed away I was—and still am, you know, a couple years later—very grief-stricken about that, right? You feel that loss very intimately all the time, every day, because that person is part of your life all the time, every day. Whereas with media characters, they’re not really a part of your whole life in the same way. We know them in that very specific context, and so that would indicate a lesser degree of closeness. You certainly feel the loss at that time, but you kind of get over it much quicker.
Garber: Yeah; that makes sense. It’s almost like the mechanisms of television, which are very, you know, episodic and very kind of in the moment. But then you turn off the TV and go on with your life.
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Valdez: I don’t know, Megan, but is that still the world we live in? Where you just turn off your TV and you can reenter reality?
Garber: Yeah; it is complicated. I use the phrase “IRL”—so “in real life”—all the time to talk about in-person interactions. And really to talk about the physical world as a general environment. But also the idea of “real life” as a distinctly physical thing can be a little misleading. Because some stuff on the web, just as we’ve been talking about, is real. The people we interact with on it, the topics we might be learning about or debating, are often real. So the screens are part of our realities. And really importantly, they mediate real relationships.
Valdez: Yeah; I mean, I justify a lot of my screen time by a version of what you just said—that these are real, meaningful relationships, and they’re relationships that I need to be spending time with.
Garber: For many of us, the screens are unavoidable. I’m looking down at my little watch right now. They’re just around these screens. Which makes me think about Marshall McLuhan, who did so much to shape the way people talk about media today. He talked about screens, and really media in general—whether they help us to see each other, or hear each other, or just know each other—how those mediums become “extensions of man.” And I think what we’re seeing right now is what it really means to have our devices in a very direct and often literal way be extensions of us.
Valdez: And we’re not really even just experiencing screens more as a part of our lives; we’re bringing more parts of our lives into our screens.
Garber: Yes. It’s no longer just fictional stories or, you know, the straight-ahead news from the streets. Instead, we’re just witnessing other people’s lives as they choose to share them. We’re invited to their living rooms, into their kitchens, medicine cabinets. [Laughter.] And it’s just creating all these new ways of seeing each other—whether in a literal sense or just in a broader way of awareness and connection to other people’s lives.
Valdez: We’re physically looking at other people so much more than we ever probably have. There’s a study by this psychologist named Gayle Stever that discusses how we’re hardwired to become connected to faces and voices: things that are familiar to us. And her findings suggest that parasocial connections, like we’re talking about, might just be natural extensions of this evolutionary instinct that exists in us. So, if we’re constantly being presented with people on our screens, maybe there’s something just simply innate in us that leads us to form these attachments.
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Garber: Dr. Ferchaud, you’ve studied what people connect with when they watch other people on screen, and I’d love to know what your research found. Is it authenticity that we’re seeking?
Ferchaud: I would say it’s primarily the perception of authenticity. In which case, how authentic it actually is doesn’t matter, really.
Garber: Oh, interesting.
Ferchaud: I do have a study where we looked at YouTubers and parasocial attributes—like, what they were doing in their videos to sort of cultivate a parasocial relationship. And so if we think about, for example, a YouTuber: A lot of those people start off—if we go back to like 2005, 2006, when YouTube was really just starting—those people are starting off in their bedrooms with, like, a janky camera. And it gives this idea like, Okay, I’m just a regular person. You’re just a regular person. We’re all just regular people together. [Laughter.] That industry has changed quite a bit.
Garber: Yep.
Ferchaud: YouTubers are professionals now. And so authenticity is still that perception like, Oh, this is just a regular person like me. Because if you’re an influencer, your whole career is based on your ability to create parasocial relationships. Right?
Garber: Yeah.
Ferchaud: So, what we found is that it was a lot of self-disclosure, and we were pretty broad with that. So it didn’t have to be, like, a deep, dark. It could be something very small. And what we found there was: It didn’t really matter the type of self-disclosure. So it could be positive things: “I had a good day. I did some fun stuff with my friends.” You know, it could be neutral things: “I woke up late today.” It could be negative things. It didn’t really matter. It still built those feelings of authenticity. That maps social relationships. Generally speaking, if you’ve got a friend, you know some positive things, some negative things, some neutral things about them.
Garber: I wonder, too, about the lines, then, between sort of the parasocial relationship of today and the celebrity. You know, the “celebrity” is such an old idea, and I think many viewers and many audiences felt some kind of ownership over celebrities—at least their images, their, you know, PR realities. All that kind of stuff. So what are some of the differences between the modern parasocial relationship and the long-standing celebrity relationship?
Ferchaud: So if we think about it, we go back to the golden age of cinema. If you look into it, it’s really wild what the movie studios of the time, how much control they had over stars’ lives.
Garber: Yes.
Ferchaud: And they would do things like arrange marriages. So they had this crazy control; so the images were very, very curated. Now, there’s just so much more access—and part of it, you know, when you think about an influencer, they are inviting people into their lives in a certain way. And there is that feeling of This is authentic, this is real—in a way that, you know, 1920s Hollywood doesn’t feel, because it was so carefully constructed. And I think that that authenticity kind of builds these parasocial relationships in a way that is interesting and unique. This idea of celebrity—that is also a parasocial relationship, but it is a little bit different. Because unlike our traditional understanding of influencers, a celebrity is sort of on a pedestal. Like, it’s hard to imagine Beyoncé shopping at Publix. [Laughter.] I don’t know. That would kind of break your brain a little bit.
Garber: It really would, yes.
Ferchaud: In a way, that’s not true with influencers, because of that sort of perception of authenticity a little bit more.
Garber: That totally makes sense. And it makes me wonder, too, if parasocial relationships and influencers, as they are having more influence over everything, if that will change our ideas about celebrity, too. I mean: Maybe the celebrities of the future—even the Beyoncé levels of celebrity in the future—you know, will be shopping at Publix. And will actually make a point of showing us that they shop at Publix, you know, to perform authenticity in that way.
Ferchaud: Well, I mean, I remember when Leo Messi moved to play at Inter Miami, somebody posted a video of him at Publix, and everybody was like, “Oh my gosh, how cool. He’s at Publix, you know, one of the most famous people in the world. And they shop at Publix.” I think people actually really respond to stuff like, “This is a real person. He shops at Publix.” Social media has changed the amount of access we get with celebrities.
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Valdez: Megan, there’s sort of this inversion happening in which, maybe, influencers who gained followers by being quote-unquote “authentic” and letting you into their lives are now curating their lives more similarly to how the studios and the actors have traditionally done. And celebrities—who have historically been very curated and manicured—are showing us parts of their lives that are more authentic.
Garber: Yes, definitely. I think that’s such a good point. And I also wonder whether the inversion you’re describing is also just a matter of technological logistics—just a function, basically, of the way we now interact with each other through screens. This is something else that Marshall McLuhan talked about. You know, we may think about technology as gadgets that we build and use and, most importantly, that we control. But he said that tech also controls us.
Valdez: Oh yeah.
Garber: Yeah. Like, technology basically has an ideology baked into it in some way, where, you know, each new piece of technology—whether it’s a newspaper or a radio or a TV or a smartphone—has assumptions basically baked into it about how the human should interact with it.
Valdez: Yes.
Garber: And when we interact with those devices over time, that kind of conditions us to live according to those assumptions: according to the way that the technology, you know, guides us to live. So print mediums encourage us to think in ways that are basically, you know, printy—linear, logical. Valdez: Right.
Garber: And screen mediums are much more visceral and immediate.
Valdez: Yeah. And what about AI? Where is that going to fit into all of this? Right now there is just a lot of discussion around how AI is learning about us through large-language models, but how is it going to impact the way we think and how we look for connection?
Garber: Yes, yes, yes.
Valdez: We’re in this moment where it’s actually becoming quite hard for people to be able to discern instantly if something is even AI or not.
Garber: Yeah. Yup.
Valdez: So what do we call that relationship?
Garber: Mmm. I asked Dr. Ferchaud about that. I wanted to know, especially, if the relationships that people are building with AI could still be considered parasocial. Or if—as the bots learn how to imitate human connection—we should think differently about our relationships with AI.
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Ferchaud: It is parasocial insomuch as that it’s one-sided, which is part of the definition of what parasocial is. But because the illusion of it being two-sided is so much deeper than, like, you’re watching somebody on TV, right?
Garber: Yeah. Yeah.
Ferchaud: So if we think about, like, a chatbot talking to you and you talking to it—it certainly seems more social in one sense, because you’re talking and getting a response. But generally speaking, they don’t have memory in the same way that humans do. And they don’t build relationships the same way humans do. As of right now, I’m sure, you know, I’m not—[Laughter.]—an AI person who’s designing and developing AI. And so they might listen to this and be like, “Just you wait.”
Garber: [Laughter.] Yeah, that’s right. There’s a bot that’s remembering you right now.
Ferchaud: I’m gonna train my bot right now.
Garber: Promise I’m not a bot.[Laughter.]
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Valdez: AI definitely feels like another evolution of the technology and the tools that we’ve seen. And, just like with those other tools, and with those other technologies and that other evolution, it’s really a bit incumbent on us—as people who are using those tools and technologies—to make sure that we’re not forming any sort of, you know, bad relationship to it. Like, we’ve got to check ourselves. Just like, you know: Anybody could have a potentially bad relationship in a parasocial relationship where they take it too far. With AI, we’re going to have to do the same thing.
Garber: Oh, I love that comparison. You know, we learn in adulthood to build boundaries in those relationships to protect ourselves, often, and to manage our vulnerabilities. Yeah, and our intimacies. And protect other people, too.
Valdez: Right.
Garber: And maybe we are in the kind of preteen phase of figuring out the relationship that we have with AI.
Valdez: Mmm. The preteen phase, the most fun phase to go through. [Laughter.]
Garber: And maybe the hardest, too; yeah.
Valdez: Interestingly, it’s also a phase where we are shifting our relationships to be more personal in nature. Researchers have found that this is the time you’re sharing more intimate thoughts with people outside your families. You’re letting people into your inner life. So actually, maybe describing this time with our devices as a sort of adolescence is really appropriate.
Garber: Yeah. And adolescence is also so, like, future-oriented, right? So much of that phase of life isn’t just about the relationships you’re forging, but about looking ahead and sort of figuring out how you want to be, who you want to become. And I think that’s useful, here, too—thinking about what kind of digital adulthood we want to create together, and especially what types of relationships we want to be building with each other.
Valdez: I actually think it’s really important that we’re not too quick to demonize this behavior. Like, what’s clear to me is that parasocial relationships are actually fine and normal to have. I mean, for some people, yes, there is a small risk of these relationships turning dysfunctional. But largely, parasocial relationships fulfill some sort of need we have in our lives.
Garber: Yes, and a really profound need too, I think. I’ve been thinking: We tend to talk about social media and bots and the web in general as things that are totally new and, you know, unprecedented. And therefore so hard to figure out. But the machines are really just new tools for doing this very ancient thing: which, like you said, is connecting with each other. Humans are social animals. And we’ll find ways to be social, whether it’s on a Zoom call, in person, or on a podcast.
Valdez: Well, it’s been really nice connecting with you, Megan.
Garber: Nice connecting with you too, Andrea!
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Garber: That’s all for this episode of How to Know What’s Real. This episode was hosted by Andrea Valdez and me, Megan Garber. Our producer is Natalie Brennan. Our editors are Claudine Ebeid and Jocelyn Frank. Fact-check by Ena Alvarado. Our engineer is Rob Smierciak. Rob also composed some of the music for this show. The executive producer of audio is Claudine Ebeid, and the managing editor of audio is Andrea Valdez.
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Valdez: Next time on How to Know What’s Real:
danah boyd: When we go online, you know, there’s joy in interacting with the people we know. But there’s also pleasure to, you know, what I think of as that, you know, the digital street, right? The ability to just see other people living their lives in ways that you’re just like, Wow, that’s different, and I’m intrigued.
Garber: What we can learn from urbanization about how to live in a crowded, bustling digital world.
We’ll be back with you on Monday.