The age of the parasocial relationship

My husband and I got a Peloton bike for the usual reasons: because we were time-poor, money-rich and feeling fat. And we kept using it for the usual reason: because we wanted to please the gorgeous ghosts in the machine.

The American fitness brand Peloton employs some of the most beautiful, athletic and charismatic people ever to have lived. Their job is not actually to teach an effective class to the viewers at home on their stationary bikes, or to make their users healthier and slimmer (I have accomplished neither). Rather, it is to give an impression of warmth and intimacy while staring at a silent camera lens in an empty room.

My favorite coaches (since you asked) are Tumi, Ally, Emma and Denis, the last of whom has a particularly passionate following among older ladies. His fan club, “Denis’s Menaces,” has more than 16,000 members on Facebook and sells T-shirts emblazoned with the word “MENACE.”

There is a perennial Mumsnet debate about whether children ought to say ‘please’ and ‘thank you’ to an Alexa

Sometimes Peloton classes are held with an audience in the room, cycling along with the viewers at home, and diehard fans will show up in the front row with T-shirts honoring their coach. I don’t like it when that happens. It reminds me that Denis and I do not in fact have a precious and unique relationship, and that really I am just a fan, like all these other crazy women.

My relationship with Denis is a parasocial one. That is, it resembles a social relationship, in that I feel a sense of affinity and familiarity when his face pops up on screen. But we are not actually friends, for the simple reason that he has no idea who I am (unless, of course, he is a Spectator reader — in which case, Denis, do get in touch).

We are living in the age of the parasocial relationship, which is not to say that this is an entirely new phenomenon. Celebrity pre-dates radio, television and even print media. But modern technology — in particular, on-demand audiovisual entertainment — is particularly effective at conjuring the impression of social intimacy.

The term “parasocial” was coined in a 1956 paper by the sociologists Donald Horton and Richard Wohl, who argued that television offered the potential for a new kind of relationship. “Often [the TV star] faces the spectator,” they observed, “uses the mode of direct address, talks as if he were conversing personally and privately.” In other words, the viewer could easily get the impression that this collection of pixels was talking directly to them and a one-sided relationship could thus develop.

The television of the 1950s had nothing on the podcast for parasocial effect, not least because headphones exaggerate the impression of intimacy due to a phenomenon called “in-head localization” — that is, they make it seem as if the voices are coming from inside your head. The point of the podcast is not to convey information, since text is a far more efficient medium for that purpose. Chris Williamson, host of the wildly successful podcast Modern Wisdom, describes his job as that of a “vibe architect,” a phrase I often think of, both while recording my own podcast and while consuming other people’s. Like most listeners, I turn to my favorite podcasts when I long for a specific vibe: that is, when I want to experience the pleasure of spending time with friends without any of the effort of brushing my hair, leaving my house or being nice.

The age of the parasocial relationship has affected children just as profoundly as adults, and this is not necessarily a bad thing. Research suggests that beloved TV characters can perform the same function as imaginary friends, encouraging children to practice social skills even while alone. Our two-year-old has a passionate love for the children’s media star Zog, an orange dragon who looks and behaves more like a chubby labrador than a monster. Does he believe that Zog is “real?” Yes, maybe. Having seen Zog walk and talk on TV, our son now pretends to feed, dress and soothe the cuddly toy version to sleep. This strikes me as a nice (and cute) example of a parasocial playmate.

But parasocial relationships can easily become weird, particularly for young children, since they are even less capable than adults of psychologically separating them from real ones. One 2021 study of families who owned an “artificial intelligent conversational agent” — e.g. an Amazon Alexa or Google Echo — found that a majority of children under the age of six believed their AI servant to be alive, and would ask it questions based on that assumption. (My favorite example was “Alexa, are you a princess?”)

A perennial debate on the parenting forum Mumsnet concerns whether or not children ought to be taught to say “please” and “thank you” to an Alexa. There is definitely something displeasing about seeing a child speak rudely to an apparently anthropomorphic agent. But, then again, perhaps we should be teaching our children to maintain a healthy distrust for AI? A famous line from Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets could be applied just as well to modern technology as it can be to magical objects: “Never trust anything that can think for itself if you can’t see where it keeps its brain.”

You don’t have to be a full-on millenarian about the threat from super intelligent AI to believe that parasocial relationships ought to be treated with caution. The 2013 film Her presents a particularly plausible vision of one possible AI future. Joaquin Phoenix stars as a lonely man who falls in love with the disembodied voice of his AI personal assistant, played by Scarlett Johansson. This AI is entirely unlike HAL in 2001: A Space Odyssey, in that the only threat she presents is in her niceness — she is such pleasant company that her owner no longer feels the need to spend time with flesh-and-blood people and so becomes increasingly reclusive, along with many of his friends and neighbors who have also fallen in love with a computer program that can’t love them back.

The pleasure of the parasocial relationship lies in the fact that, unlike a real relationship, it is effortless, voluntary and uncomplicated. And therein also lies its peril.

This article was originally published in The Spectator’s UK magazine. Subscribe to the World edition here.