A few years ago, I was scrolling through Instagram when I stumbled onto pictures from several college friends attending a mutual friend’s wedding, a wedding to which I’d never received an invitation.

Looking through the group photos, I realized I was the only one of our core group who wasn’t there. I’d even spoken with a few of them not that long ago and none of them had mentioned anything about it. I felt thoroughly rejected, not just by the bride I’d once been fairly close to but by the friends we’d shared as well. I checked and saw the bride and I were still friends on Facebook, but somewhere in the intervening years we’d stopped being friends in our actual lives, and I hadn’t noticed.

A recent video from Joseph Folley of the Unsolicited Advice channel on Youtube got me thinking about my withdrawal from corporate social media in the context of the internet’s growing propensity for fostering parasocial relationships. It helped me develop some language for a particular type of relationship my accounts had become cluttered with before I had left them, a type of relationship I still feel somewhat haunted by - the para-parasocial.

In the video, Folley cites the paper “On the Ethics of Parasocial Relationships” by Archer and Robb, who outline three axis the lack of reciprocity in parasocial relationships tend to take place on: attentional asymmetry, communication asymmetry, and epistemic asymmetry. As I thought through each of these axis, I realized that a great many of the “friends” I’d collected when on social media had had elements of this asymmetry. Even more than that, it seemed to me to be an almost inevitable consequence of the design of the platforms themselves.

Archer and Robb discuss parasociality specifically within the context of a celebrity-fan relationship. As such, they describe the attentional asymmetry as manifesting in two primary ways:

“First, the fan will be more likely to give individual attention to the celebrity, whereas the celebrity is more likely to pay attention to their fans as part of a more generalized fan base. Second, the individual fan is likely to spend more time interacting with the celebrity, whereas the celebrity is less likely to prioritize fan interaction.”

I’ve never been one to follow celebrities on social media much, and yet this dynamic feels familiar to me. Not necessarily within the context of public figures, but more so in those weak social connections that social media platforms by their nature tend to collect. It’s often easier and safer to give someone you’re speaking with on a dating app your Instagram handle over your phone number, for instance. The broadcasting nature of many platforms makes them more useful for event organizers to share than, say, an email. With this convenience comes a kind of social detritus that can build up.

In those weak connections, levels of affection, appraisal, and attention aren’t always clear. One person may spend a lot of time watching someone’s stories and commenting on posts, but the other person may see them as part of a group of people - event attendees, college acquaintances, etc - that they may not necessarily be inclined to stay current with unless it’s to one of their ends. This isn’t inherently bad; the app is one thing to one person and another to another - often many things simultaneously to each. It’s an asymmetry of personal information that the app obscures.

It’s easier to see in person whether someone is listening to you and how they’re receiving what you’re saying. But seeing that someone has seen your stories doesn’t tell you how much of it they saw or whether they were interested in it at all. Most platforms don’t allow people to know they’ve been muted by someone else. The “like” and “favorite” functions on sites often function less like markers of particular enjoyment and more like reassurance to someone that you read what they wrote because we recognize this deficit on some level - though there again it conveys nothing in kind. These platforms are designed to make you feel like you’re being paid attention to, and in the absence of better information, we’re left to extrapolate the quality and meaning of an oversimplified metric.

For all the flaws in his work, I do like Jonathan Haidt’s four features of “social interactions…that have been typical for millions of years:” embodied, synchronous, one-to-one or one-to-several, and settings and communities with a high bar for entry and exit. He contrasts that with the rise in interactions that are disembodied, asynchronous, one-to-many, and have a low bar for entry and exit.

When I reflected on my friendship with the bride, I’d realized it’d been years since I’d had interactions with her that met any of those criteria for typical interactions. While I’d reached out here and there, neither of us had made much of an effort to have a quality interaction in quite some time. It was the sort of relationship that perhaps had felt stronger in it’s proximity and naturally weakened with time and distance. In a Facebook-less world, I might have heard about her marriage through the grapevine and mentally wished her well. But because I’d continued paying attention to her life - with no information as to how she was paying attention to mine - the design had made it harder to see that shift in the relationship, and the lack of invitation felt personal when it likely wasn’t.

Communication asymmetry is deceptively similar but crucially different. Within the context of a celebrity-fan relationship, this refers to the celebrity’s tendency broadcast content and the fan’s to consume said content. Even when fans respond to the work, it’s usually quite limited. In Kehrberg’s 2015 survey of fan replies to celebrity tweets on Twitter, she found that most of them expressed praise and admiration - attempts to capture goodwill. “Since the soliciting of favour is a less important element of communication written to peers and people of lower standing, this emphasis suggests that Twitter users see themselves not as celebrity peers but as consumers, positioned lower on a hierarchy of sender/receiver relations that dictate rhetorical structure.”

This got me thinking about how most corporate social media sites currently are designed where every user is expected to broadcast to some degree. We are all put in the position of the celebrity and the fan to a degree, even with those people which we know personally. When the mode through which most of the communication between individuals takes place in a space is this broadcasting, the depersonalization of it creates distance and demands a different kind of deference. I realized that when I was still on these platforms, the comments I sent and received were also generally ones of admiration or well-wishes - seeking goodwill.

Returning to Jonathan Haidt’s work again, I think this communication pattern is the natural consequence of having the social interactions on a platform with a low barrier to entry and a low barrier to exit become primary over those spaces where there is a high barrier to entry and a high barrier to exit. Each person we interact with on a social media platform and each of us in turn could potentially bar or get barred from real world social spaces for mistakes that would have, in the time before Web 2.0, largely been brushed off. Those of us who struggle socially now have even less of a safety net - and it’s not exactly like it was easy before.

I’ve experienced this first-hand several times. In one group, I asked a question in a group’s Discord that was misconstrued as being critical/in bad faith instead of as a result of my very genuine confusion. I’d asked similar questions in person before without incident, and it’s likely even those bothered by them brushed them off and continued on. But because of the norms in the digital space, I was formally warned in front of the whole group. I felt unwelcome to go back to those spaces, digital or in-person, afterwards.

I know I’m far from being alone in experiences like this. Most people I know have experienced a digital faux pas messing with in person social situations at least once or twice. What this means is that we each know that pain, and it increases our fear of each other. When social anxiety is so widespread, it’s no wonder that reactivity (fight) and avoidance of the uncomfortable/nuanced (flight) are much the norm, especially in digital spaces.

What I’ve found as well is that deference reproduces social hierarchies that were already commonly found in friend groups but without any of the grace people generally extended in in-person interactions. The type of people that friend groups tended to gather around continued to hold sway, in my experience. There was no democratizing of social import that came with the increased visibility of individual lives on social media.

This means that within friend groups, I saw that difference between broadcasting and consumption start to develop. It was rare even that a friend group I was in watched or viewed everything that everyone put out equally. Some people were important enough to consume all of the time. Others could be missed. When that difference takes place within the context of a celebrity-fan interaction, it’s to be expected. But when that pattern gets replicated among people who are supposed to be equal, that reduction from friend to fan is humilitating and much more public than it used to be in decades past.

Epistemic asymmetry in the context of celebrities and fans refers to the difference between how much a fan knows about the celebrity versus how much the celebrity knows about the fan. While this is due to the sheer number of fans in the case of celebrities, I’ve experienced this on social media both ways just due to the function of following and the algorithmic feed. I’ve had the odd experience where I met someone who followed my Tumblr but who I didn’t follow and having them mention quite personal things that I’d more or less forgotten I’d written about. I’ve also had where my feed kept giving me updates about an old acquaintances projects, but when I saw them in passing I realized their feed had shown them none of mine.

I think what is interesting and potentially troubling about epistemic gaps that social media creates for ordinary users is that, similar to the other asymmetries, the platform’s design makes them difficult to know about. That, for me at least, adds to the sense of unease I had when using them. It was uncomfortable never quite knowing who had and had not received what I’d broadcasted. Did someone I really care about skip it? Did someone I didn’t know well feel much closer to me because of it? Sure all of this can take place in the context of everyday life as well, but given the primacy and fragility of interactions in the digital space, it all began to feel so much riskier to not be aware of.

I’ve noticed that as my friends and family complain more about not having as much energy, they are more likely to prioritize broadcasting over personal conversations. I understand it; broadcasting reaches more people and there’s less risk involved in many ways. The platforms are optimized for consumption, and they’ve trained even ordinary folks how to package their lives more consumably. The ones who are the best at this are then the people I know the most about - not because we’re close or I care about what they’re doing more, but because even the friends and family tab on Instagram was itself an algorithm that made decisions about who to show me. It was unsettling to realize that the people I knew the most about in my life were those who were the best at showing and withholding what suited that platform’s algorithm, that interplay crowning each circle’s “celebrities” among “fans”.

Folley mentions in his video that he prefers to think of parasocial relationships as ones that are “primarily mediated through the imagination:” It struck me that I could think of hardly anyone I used to follow where that wasn’t true to a degree. For weak social connections, it was particularly true. I technically knew them in real life, but I only really knew their life through their curation of it on social media. Every gap was fertile ground for my mind to grow up a head canon around an actual living being. While the stakes were low, it was still uncomfortable to realize I had come to just firmly believe things about people who I had barely spoken to.

I think in cases of celebrities, it is often easier to remember that you’re experiencing them through your imagination of them, that their socials are part of the performance of their brand, that they are real people who’ve devoted a portion of their life to an audience’s entertainment. But the lines are so much blurrier when it comes to ordinary individuals. I, at least, find it harder to remember that I haven’t meaningfully spoken to the girl from high school since high school, so I can’t know what she really means by a given caption. And I was usually scrolling because I was tired or stressed; the last thing I want to have to do when I’m using something to decompress is stay very mindful while using it. Especially given the very real cost to my social life a potential slip up could bring, where’s the calm in that?

And I want to be clear here that I don’t think parasociality is itself bad. It is a type of social relation we all engage in to one degree or another. We are expected, by virtue of our political and economic systems, to know about many people we will never meet. People form attachments to characters in novels as well as YouTubers. This isn’t embarrassing or something we need to avoid at all costs; it’s just one thread in the rich tapestry of human socialization. And I think for many people, those parasocial relationships can serve some good. For instance, I think of the inspiration many Buddhist monastics I could only encounter through YouTube have had on my spiritual life.

But a big part of the reason I felt compelled to leave social media does lie in its parasociality at the structural level and how the primacy of these online interactions is providing an avenue for that kind of relationship - nonreciprocal, consumptive - to creep more and more into offline ones. It’s not that I mind a fun parasocial experience here and there - getting a kind reply from someone you admire is a lovely time - it’s just that online spaces more and more make it feel like that is all that is on offer, on the app and off. And if it’s that or simply being with myself, I’d rather choose to spend that time with myself. At least I can remember that I am human.