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Sunday, October 13, 2024
Parasocial relationship
At the Spiel in Essen I crossed paths with a YouTube content creator, part of the Dice Tower team. Recognizing his face, I gave a short "hi" wave, and he politely nodded back. And that is the most real world social interaction I ever had with any online content creator. I know a lot of faces, maybe know a bit about these people from what they tell online, but they don't know me at all. It is a so-called parasocial relationship, which by nature is completely asymmetric.
A reader made a comment about this on my blog recently, and while you don't know my face or voice because I don't do videos, the parasocial quality of the interaction is similar. You feel you know *something* of me, while I know a lot less about you. I'm approaching 6,500 blog posts on this blog, so of course I revealed some part of me. But there are large areas of my life I don't talk about for various reasons, for example most employers wouldn't appreciate if a content creator would publish company internals on social media. Your feeling of "knowing me" is mostly an illusion.
Would you send a complete stranger 5 bucks a month? Probably not. A part of the business model of internet content creation is based on the parasocial relationship between the content creator and the viewer. As we don't consider the content creator to be a complete stranger, we are more likely to pay for a subscription to his channel, send a donation, or support him on Patreon. But if you consider what a monthly subscription to Netflix costs, and how much content you get for that, the subscription to a single content creator on YouTube or Twitch or Patreon is obviously a rather bad deal.
Still, at some point you probably had the nagging feeling that you "owed" the content creator something. I certainly did pay for some of those subscriptions, although now in retirement I cut down on that expense: I still pay for YouTube Premium, which gives some of my subscription money to content creators in proportion to how much I watch them. And I have Amazon Prime, which comes with one free monthly subscription on Twitch, which I tend to give to some channel I like and that doesn't already have a lot of subscribers. If an angel of karmic justice descends on me and wants to smite me for freeloading on what these content creators provide to me, I'll point out to him that I have been providing free content on the internet for 21 years, with minimal financial returns. My karma should be in the positive. :)
To be very clear, I don't think that you owe me anything, however long you have been reading my blog. Creating content on the internet is always to some extent motivated by the desire to express yourself, to share your thoughts with others. Others already reading my thoughts and being interested in what I think is already a reward. When I started this, the idea that somebody would make a living of creating content for the internet was laughable. I am still not convinced it is a very good idea, as tastes are fickle, internet content creator is the ultimate "gig" job, and it doesn't come with a lot of security or a pension plan. There is also something rather base and mercenary about the content which is created mostly with a financial motive, like the streamer telling you about the "best game ever", only to drop the game a few days later and never streaming it again. And even if I might piss some people off by saying so, philosophically you can draw a straight line from the financially motivated Twitch gaming channel, to the Twitch "hot tub" channel, to a channel on OnlyFans. The content creators do what they need to do to get their monthly income. And only very few of them make it on Twitch, the median number of subscribers on Twitch is between 0 and 1.
Note that I also don't think that I owe you something. I am trying to keep up a more or less steady stream of content, but that depends on my mood. When I talk about games that are currently "hot", that is mostly because I myself am often interested in current games. A good part of this blog is a personal diary in disguise, a journal of the part of my life that I don't mind sharing. I don't know if you ever were in a situation where you stumble across an older game and think "I played that, but I don't really remember it well enough to still know what I thought about it". Well, I know where to look that information up for myself.
The peak interest in my blog was around the time when YouTube just started and Twitch was still called Justin.TV. One could speculate in hindsight whether in a parallel life I could have made the move from gaming blogging to creating gaming streaming content and would have made a lot of money that way. In reality, the thought never crossed my mind, due to already having a well-paying day job I liked well enough at that time. Even now, my retirement is financially comfortable enough for me to not search for another source of income. I think I can live with the fact that nobody recognizes me at the Spiel in Essen and waves "hi" to me.
- posted by Tobold @ 10:31 AM Permanent Link
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"Your feeling of "knowing me" is mostly an illusion."
No more so than my feeling of knowing anyone, surely? I know everyone, regardless of whether i met them online or offline, only in so far as my interactions with them has allowed me know them. "Parasocial" relationships are ones where there's no interaction on one side, aren't they? You and I have interacted in the comments numerous times and I've interacted with other bloggers in a similat fashion far, far more frequently than that. That's a social relationship, not a parasocial one.
Take, for example, my offline relationship with my next door neighbor. I've lived next door to her for thirty years. I know what she looks like but absolutely nothing else about her. I've spoken to her maybe a dozen times, always on a practical matter like cutting a hedge or collecting a parcel that's been mis-delivered. I have a relationship with her that no-one could call "parasocial" but I don't know her. Thanks to having read hundreds of thousands of words you've written, I "know" you far better. The fact that I couldn't recognize you in the street doesn't make that relationship less tha the one I have with my neighbor, about whom I know almost nothing at all.
The same applies in differing degrees to all relationships. The extent of knowledge and its particular qualities differ but the fundemental nature of ther relationship being illusory does not.
No more so than my feeling of knowing anyone, surely? I know everyone, regardless of whether i met them online or offline, only in so far as my interactions with them has allowed me know them. "Parasocial" relationships are ones where there's no interaction on one side, aren't they? You and I have interacted in the comments numerous times and I've interacted with other bloggers in a similat fashion far, far more frequently than that. That's a social relationship, not a parasocial one.
Take, for example, my offline relationship with my next door neighbor. I've lived next door to her for thirty years. I know what she looks like but absolutely nothing else about her. I've spoken to her maybe a dozen times, always on a practical matter like cutting a hedge or collecting a parcel that's been mis-delivered. I have a relationship with her that no-one could call "parasocial" but I don't know her. Thanks to having read hundreds of thousands of words you've written, I "know" you far better. The fact that I couldn't recognize you in the street doesn't make that relationship less tha the one I have with my neighbor, about whom I know almost nothing at all.
The same applies in differing degrees to all relationships. The extent of knowledge and its particular qualities differ but the fundemental nature of ther relationship being illusory does not.
My first para-social interaction was years ago with a writer from a gaming magazine. They would also record some of their reviews of popular games and also had an ongoing parody centred around gaming stuff that they would ship on CDs with the magazine.
So I ran into that guy at a convention and jokingly asked him about a thing in relation to something from that parody and you could see in his face that he had no clue what I meant. Like, imagine asking someone from a sitcom when this or that will happen...
Tobold: "Would you send a complete stranger 5 bucks a month?"
Would you give a street busker 5 bucks when you like the music?
That's how I see the content creators: they do something (they like?) and share it with you to also enjoy. Then you reward them, so that they continue to provide you with more of it. (There is of course a chance for Goodhart's Law in there.)
There is the more insidious variant where the content creator or their mods pressure the audience into giving them money by exploiting the para-social relationship. No, just because they read your line from chat or your donation text, they are not your friend.
Even more bizarre for me are people gifting donations to a streamer. Yes, then you can express how much money you have and are displayed for a while as the top this or that with a few pixels next to your name - but you just threw money at a company to then share a portion with the streamer.
Even if the person would be close to you and all, imagine taking your money, giving it to a random third party so that they can give less of that money to the person you want to give it to.
So I ran into that guy at a convention and jokingly asked him about a thing in relation to something from that parody and you could see in his face that he had no clue what I meant. Like, imagine asking someone from a sitcom when this or that will happen...
Tobold: "Would you send a complete stranger 5 bucks a month?"
Would you give a street busker 5 bucks when you like the music?
That's how I see the content creators: they do something (they like?) and share it with you to also enjoy. Then you reward them, so that they continue to provide you with more of it. (There is of course a chance for Goodhart's Law in there.)
There is the more insidious variant where the content creator or their mods pressure the audience into giving them money by exploiting the para-social relationship. No, just because they read your line from chat or your donation text, they are not your friend.
Even more bizarre for me are people gifting donations to a streamer. Yes, then you can express how much money you have and are displayed for a while as the top this or that with a few pixels next to your name - but you just threw money at a company to then share a portion with the streamer.
Even if the person would be close to you and all, imagine taking your money, giving it to a random third party so that they can give less of that money to the person you want to give it to.
I would think that your and my relationship to Tobold is still para-social. Less as we comment every now and then, so we also reveal our existence (or at least a part of it). But have you seen the list of comments on the post about tobold.com? Now imagine them going "I have read the life/blog for X years. I know him." but they are merely a +1 on the visitor count.
The relationship to your neighbour is maybe social even if only rudimentary. She knows you exist and you know she exists. Unless one of you snoop through the other's mail and hang around the window with binoculars, it's just a very basic social relationship at best.
The para-social aspect comes from believing your "understanding" or knowing the other person must also exist in reverse on the other side. It's a social ape routine that is distorted by the one sided nature of streaming.
I always find it fascinating how people record and "interact" with viewers in YT content. They sit in front of a dead camera, no reaction, emotion or anything and pretend to speak to the viewer who will only watch it way later.
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The relationship to your neighbour is maybe social even if only rudimentary. She knows you exist and you know she exists. Unless one of you snoop through the other's mail and hang around the window with binoculars, it's just a very basic social relationship at best.
The para-social aspect comes from believing your "understanding" or knowing the other person must also exist in reverse on the other side. It's a social ape routine that is distorted by the one sided nature of streaming.
I always find it fascinating how people record and "interact" with viewers in YT content. They sit in front of a dead camera, no reaction, emotion or anything and pretend to speak to the viewer who will only watch it way later.
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