We’re all Parasocial Now
Humans are social beings, wired for connection with other people. We crave evidence of another mind. You may have started out by first checking if this post is human versus AI generated (it’s human). Why do we crave a human author? We crave it because it makes us feel alive to enter into the mind of another person — if only to discover that what we assume about their inner world, and by extension our own, is wrong.
Social relationships are demanding. They involve exchanges of complex, omnichannel, fast moving information that isn’t always synchronized. In a social exchange, you have to be able to take in (or ignore) another person’s body language, word choice, volume, prosody, tone of voice, presence, attunement, attachment style, main points, supporting arguments, sarcasm, agenda, and conversational pace, all the while regulating your own, as well as whatever happens to be distracting, relevant, or interrupting in the environment. They are also risky. You risk being judged, misunderstood, disagreed with, or rejected. But those painful elements are the stuff of personal growth. And we have given them up, in exchange for parasocial relationships.
Parasocial relationships are simplified caricatures of real social relationships. You broadcast out. You receive. Usually not at the same time. You scroll. You pause. You look. You move on. People do the same with your content. You might reply, but don’t really come to know anything real about yourself or other people. Parasocial networks trained us to observe, to react — and to make no real changes to ourselves at all. AI is a medium that is a perfect response to this preferred way of relating. AI can produce fluent language, but it does not give you the same experience of encountering a person who might misunderstand you, and vice versa. It offers parasocial bonding. It permits the kind of connection we have learned to prefer.
While our mode preference may have changed, a longing for real exchange remains.
Philip Roth describes it best:
“And yet what are we to do about this terribly significant business of other people, which gets bled of the significance we think it has and takes on instead a significance that is ludicrous, so ill-equipped are we all to envision one another's interior workings and invisible aims? Is everyone to go off and lock the door and sit secluded like the lonely writers do, in a soundproof cell, summoning people out of words and then proposing that these word people are closer to the real thing than the real people that we mangle with our ignorance every day? The fact remains that getting people right is not what living is all about anyway. It's getting them wrong that is living, getting them wrong and wrong and wrong and then, on careful reconsideration, getting them wrong again. That's how we know we're alive: we're wrong. Maybe the best thing would be to forget being right or wrong about people and just go along for the ride. But if you can do that—well, lucky you.”
AI is giving us all “word people” to interact with, not because AI is evil, but because we have let ourselves come to prefer this way of relating. It is art imitating social life.
But the golden moments of humanity are not manufactured or emotionally guaranteed. They’re born in the messy, non-deliberate mistakes that lead to discoveries about our own ignorance, mainly of other people.
So talk to someone. Not because you will get them right. But because getting them wrong, and then having to reconsider, is one of the few reliable ways we come to know ourselves.
- E.S.
