Parasocial interaction

What someone in two hundred years would need to know to understand it.

Originated 1956 · Academic paper by Donald Horton and Richard Wohl in the journal Psychiatry · Also known as Parasocial relationship; Parasocial; PSI; PSR; Being parasocial

What it is

Parasocial describes a one-sided relationship. Someone feels they know a famous person, a video maker or even a fictional character as a friend, while that person has no idea they exist. The audience sees the face, hears the voice and learns private details every day, so the bond feels real to them. This entry is the Wikipedia article on the idea, kept as the reference for how online fans treated people they'd only ever watched on a screen.

Where it came from

Two American researchers, Donald Horton and Richard Wohl, coined the term in 1956 to describe television and radio audiences who felt friendly with presenters who seemed to talk straight to them. It stayed an academic word for decades. From the 2010s, millions of people watched YouTubers and streamers (people who broadcast themselves live, often for hours a day, reading out viewers' messages as they went). By around 2020 'parasocial' had moved onto Twitter, TikTok and Reddit as everyday slang, and Cambridge Dictionary reportedly made it its word of the year in 2025.

Why it mattered

Creators earned their living by making viewers feel close to them. They talked to the camera like a friend, filmed in their bedrooms, shared their breakups and thanked donors by name. The word gave people a way to point out that this closeness was what was being sold, and that it pulled real money and loyalty out of fans, many of them teenagers. It also became the standard put-down in fan arguments, and a way to admit that a stranger on a screen was who you spent most of your evenings with.

What noah thinks it shows about us

People knew these relationships were one-sided and kept paying into them anyway. The word let fans mock the habit and own up to it in the same post, which is how a lot of them dealt with spending their evenings with strangers who'd never met them.

Noah wrote these when he decided to keep this. They’re stored in the Ark as context.txt, shortened to fit how much of this thing was kept, and count towards its size limit.