Real or not real? Social Media, Parasocial Relationships, and Internet Influencers

Fangirls of the 2010s

My parasocial relationships (definition upcoming) with internet influencers started, like a lot of millennials my age, circa the 2010s when normal everyday people started using platforms like YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, & Instagram to post about their day to day while also experimenting with making money online by sharing their niche knowledge to interested audiences. Each person has their own niches. My favorite niche creators to follow back then were beauty bloggers like Jenn Im (clothesencounters), Estee Lalonde (essiebutton), or Michelle Phan (ricebunny lmao). I found their content useful and relatable. As they were all around my age (early 20s), all dating outside of their races and/or living outside of their home countries, they almost felt like “friends” to me. Over the years, I occasionally buy the stuff they recommend, purchase the books they write, or clothing/ beauty items they create with their personal brands.

When Estee out of the blue announced her separation in 2018 from her long term boyfriend of 9 years who was the reason she moved to the UK and had a career in YouTube in the first place, I was shocked and caught completely off guard. 6 years later, I had similar feelings when Jenn Im announced her divorce earlier this year from her husband of 10 years with whom she shared a son, a house, and by all accounts a good collaborative career with. In both cases, their apparently healthy, loving and mutually beneficial relationships with their significant others (see here, or here) contribute a great deal to my positive impressions of the brands they endorse or the projects they create together. When they suddenly ended the relationships without any explanation, I felt financially and more importantly, emotionally cheated and betrayed. The best way I can express this feeling is as if out of the blue, your favorite TV shows which you buy with your money and invest many hours watching, suddenly end without an explanation.

I thought: if me, an educated mother of 2 who’s also a business owner feels this way about some weird celebrity “gossips”, then: a. what is wrong with me? and b. I wonder if other people on the internet feel the same way.

A simple google, tiktok or reddit search would then appease my worry and send me straight to rabbit holes upon rabbit holes. That yes, hundreds, if not thousands of people, mother or not, business owner or not, feel similarly about the situations. My feelings, indeed, are valid.

one of the many hundred comments/threads on reddit surrounding Jenn Im’s divorce

Parasocial Relationships

So, let’s dissect this. What even are parasocial relationships? Parasocial relationships, if I have to define it, would be this:

one sided relationships where one side is completely oblivious and ignorant to the existence of the other person, while the other side is completely invested and (think that they know) the other person well.

Dictionary.com defines it as:

a relationship that a person imagines having with another person whom they do not actually know, such as a celebrity or a fictional character.

Take this definition to heart, you can see why parasocial relationships could be problematic. One obvious problem for the audience is imbalance of powers. The creators make money off of traffic to their platforms. Their audience consumes the content, perhaps buy things from the (oftentimes) carefully crafted narrative. However, audience is only privy to what the creators choose to share. So they have incomplete information when making decisions whether or not to invest their financial or emotional resources into the “relationships”. This makes them much more prone to manipulation.

Another problem is what modern day philosophers like contrapoints or lindsey ellis coined “manafactured authenticity”. That is, unlike the pre-internet celebrities who are generally unapproachable and not “one of us”, the modern day internet influencers present themselves a lot of the times as just one of their fans. In order to gain trust and following, they don’t just bombard fans with highly produced adverts. They also share facets of their lives, mistakes and stumbles in the form of life lessons, and of course, personal relationships they might engage in with other people in real time. In other words, “real” life (or something akin to it).

So when things go south, such as when the messages the creators choose to share contradict with previous messages (like a sudden breakup), a natural breakdown of trust occurs. Their fans who have followed their every move and supported every product they endorse, suddenly feel out of the loop, and like they don’t know the creators anymore. “I thought we were friends”, many would think. But unlike other relationships where there are generally resolutions or expectation of a resolution, there are no resolutions in a parasocial relationship. Audience is expected to “move on”, “respect their privacy”, “be considerate in these difficult times”.

Of course, from the creators side, there are many problems as well. They are not the traditional celebrities of the pre-internet day with at least a layer of separation between them and their fans. The most successful of them all, as mentioned above, are generally more approachable, accessible, friendly. In fact, traditional celebrities in recent years have started to copy this strategy and try to erase the gap between them and their fans by sharing more personal stuff online. The trade off for influencers in this case is the slow (or sometimes fast) erosion of their personal privacy. Many cope with it by suddenly disappearing from the internet for a while (like Michelle Phan). Others choose to never share certain aspects of their life with the internet, such as their romantic partners, or their children. But for the most part, the unfortunate burden of being an influencer is that part of your life at least is there for you to monetize, and hence, you’ve gotta share it. At the end of the day, it’s their job.

Additionally, influencers also face unfair criticism and scrutiny from bad faith actors due to the sheer amount of stuff that they share online. People speculate, judge, and sometimes just outright make up lies and defame them. People feel entitled to parts of their lives they have no business in knowing. And the speed at which information and disinformation travel is a lot in the internet age.

For example, Estee expressed worsened anxiety and PTSD from the barrage of negativity and even conspiracy that came her way and her ex boyfriend’s way after the separation announcement. She proceeded to deleting all of her old videos featuring the ex (and presumably any residual income that might come from them.) Jenn Im faced a lot of accusations of her being a “bad mother” and had to defend herself amidst her own messy divorce and coparenting journey. Which sounds horrible for anyone, celebrity or not.

“It’s the price of fame”, the old adage goes. But what’s different this time around is just how alarming close to real life their online persona is, and they have to have a certain online presence to do their job. After a traditional entertainment role, artists can go back to their “real life” and leave their role behind. But not these internet creators. They might experience a very real phenomena unique to internet age, wherein they start to believe the things and sometimes lies people say about them, and find it hard to distinguish what’s real from what’s not. It’s one thing for 1 random person to say you are a bad mother. It’s a PR disaster, personal nightmare and mental hellscape when thousands of people who you thought were your fans like a comment calling you a “bad mother” during your darkest days. I’d imagined they would feel betrayed & manipulated too.

We are all influencers in a way

Lastly, this whole tangent makes me think about my own social media usage and the personas we all portray online, whether or not we are aware of them. Everyone can have their moment of fame in the TikTok age. Everyone puts their best foot forward as literal ‘highlight reels’ on Instagram. Everyone has probably experienced a moment where they engage in an activity thinking how it would look online first, before engaging in the moments themselves.

If you have ever met someone in real life for the first time and become shocked about how their irl appearance and actions have nothing or very little to do with what they portray online, you’ll get what I mean. We all in a way engage in these semi parasocial relationships with our online selves. The more aware we are of the thin line, the less disconnected we would prone to get when we have to go back to living our life, for our own good, and not just “for the gram”.

So the next time you find yourself comparing your life to those of others, especially those portrayed online by people you either don’t know or have not met in person for a long time, as I know we all secretly do, ask yourself this question: “Do I want to doomscroll until I rot or do I wanna go outside and smell some actual flowers instead?” Hey, most of the time, the right answer is just that. Go outside. Live your life. Nobody but you can live it.

Originally published on linhdaosmooke.com