How to Talk to People - How to Know Who’s Real

Episode Date: May 13, 2024

Social media has made it easier to build more parasocial relationships with celebrities and influencers. What impact are those connections having on our relationships IRL? And how do they shift our understanding and expectations of intimacy and trust?  Florida State University assistant professor Arienne Ferchaud defines parasocial relationships and discusses how new technologies are changing the role of entertainment in our lives. Music by Forever Sunset (“Spring Dance”), baegel (“Cyber Wham”), Etienne Roussel (“Twilight”), Dip Diet (“Sidelined”), Ben Elson (“Darkwave”), and Rob Smierciak (“Whistle”). Write to us at [e-mail].  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Andrea, growing up, did you have an imaginary friend? I did. Yeah, I had an imaginary friend whose name I cannot believe I'm going to tell you. Sorry. I cannot believe. Sorry. His name was Barfi. I definitely questioned if this imaginary friend thing really happened.

I mean, with a name like Barfi, it feels like it could be a total false memory that someone planted in my head to mess with me. But when it's come up over the years in conversation with my mom, she thinks maybe I was trying to say Barbie? Oh yes. Do you have any memory of how he came to be or what he looked like? No, I don't remember any of that. I just, I think I was just too young to really form any real coherent memories about him. My brother, he's six years older than me, so I kind of wonder if I maybe made up a friend because, you know, I was lonely when he went away to elementary school. And so Barfi wasn't really real, but Barfi was real company,

and I think I needed that type of connection for some very real reason. Yes, definitely. An RIP bar fee. I'm Andrea Valdez. I'm an editor at The Atlantic. And I'm Megan Garber, a staff writer at The Atlantic. This is How to Know What's Real. Megan, I know you've been writing about technology and culture for a long time at the Atlantic, but I feel like these last few years, you've really been focused on thinking about truth

and fiction. Uh-huh, yeah. I mean, you wrote an article last year called We're Already Living in the Metaverse. Welcome. Okay, but tell me more about what you mean by living in the metaverse. Yeah. So I'm thinking of the metaverse in part as this long-standing dream in the tech world. This hope that when computers get advanced enough, they can create environments where virtual reality seems less virtual and more reality. And of course, the tech hasn't quite caught up to that big

vision. But the idea of the metaverse is what we're navigating right now, I think. And this idea that one day we would be able to immerse ourselves in our entertainment, that's the world I think that's here. It's just that the immersion isn't strictly a matter of a single place or platform. Instead, it's everywhere. That line between reality and fantasy just feels really blurry right now. Yes. There's the obviously insidious stuff, like there's the rise of deep fakes, AI-generated scams. But then there's these like slightly murkier areas, like are content creators on YouTube

and social media showing us their authentic selves, or is it really just a performance? Yes. And in some ways, those are age-old questions, right? People have been thinking about the difference between the performed life and real life, such as it is for centuries and millennia even. But then exactly like you said, the difference feels hazier now than it's ever been.

And I think so much of that has to do with technology. I think about the line, all the world's a stage, and that used to be a metaphor, but it's becoming ever more literal. Imaginary Friends seems so childlike and so kind of fanciful and fantastical. But it does occur to me that we have versions of them, right, even as adults? Totally. that we have versions of them, right? Even as adults?

Totally. I'm thinking about, for example, the people I follow on social media. And I know in some ways very intimate details about their lives. I know what's in their medicine cabinets, what they have for breakfast. And of course they know nothing about me.

They don't know even that I exist. Do you have people in your life, Andrea, that you feel connected to in that way? Yeah, I mean, of course. There's like a lot of folks that are listening. I listen to several podcasts and I feel really close to the host of those podcasts and it makes me just feel like I really know them. And like there's a couple of running influencers that I follow on Instagram, and one of them just finished the Boston Marathon, and I was so proud of her. Oh!

And it's just really strange to say that even, because she's a total stranger. I mean, I guess I can be proud of this relative stranger, but I just knew so much about her ambition and her goals. So, yeah, it's totally weird. And with the podcasters, I mean, they're in my ears every week, so I feel like I have this sort of like

standing date with them. Yes. And I think a key thing with all those relationships is that the quote unquote friends you're describing are kind of real and imaginary at the same time. So their, definitely, and they're giving you a lot of what IRL friendships can. But also, the relation aspect is so different from what it would be IRL. And I wonder, what are those relationships we're building with

these people we don't really know. A parasocial relationship is essentially this sort of simulated relationship. So Andrea, I talked with Dr. Ariane Fascio. She is an assistant professor of communications at Florida State University, and she's been studying emerging media and especially the feelings of closeness that so many of us get just by

watching strangers on a screen, even when something as commonplace as watching the news. The news anchor is talking to the screen like they're talking to you. It sort of simulates a back and forth because they are looking right at you, they might use words like our community, lots of we and us and like inclusive language like that. So it simulates kind of a social interaction, but it's not, it's actually one-sided. Dr. Fascio, when did your interest in parasocial relationships really begin?

Through a series of kind of weird and unfortunate, not unfortunate, really fortunate events, I wound up having an on-campus job. And at first I wanted something like really easy that I wouldn't have to like do a lot, but all those were taken. So I wound up as an undergraduate assistant to a professor there by the name of Dr. Megan Sanders. And we worked on this study related to this character on the TV show House.

The character kind of abruptly committed suicide on the show and was gone off the show. This is not a real person. The actor, of course, is fine. But people were really mourning that character. He was played by Cal Penn, I remember, because he left. Oh, that's right, I remember that.

Yeah, he left to go work for Obama. And so they killed him off the show. People actually set up these Facebook pages that were memorial pages. It was virtually indistinguishable from like a memorial page you would set up for a friend. Like, oh, I'm gonna miss you so much, talking directly to the person.

But it's that same sort of idea when that character that we are really fond of is kind of taken away. People really do kind of react like they are just another person that they know. I've certainly felt that. And for me as a viewer, it's a little bit hard to process that feeling because I sort of question its validity. I know this is fiction.

This is fake. Why do I care so much? But it is a loss. It goes back to sort of evolutionary biology and psychology. Essentially, evolution happens over millions of years, right? It takes a long time. But when we think about the history of television, that hasn't been around that long in the grand scheme of things.

I mean, my parents were there when television started. So you kind of have this situation where consciously, yes parents were like there when television started. So you kind of have this situation where consciously, yes, we know this is not real. This character might be dead, but the actor's fine. But our lizard brains, in a way, don't really know the difference. So do our minds, I mean, like how do they distinguish even, I mean, between the sort of factual person and the fictional person,

or is the point that they simply don't? Yeah, on some level, they don't. Based on what I know about parasocial relationships, I think it's a matter of closeness to some degree. You know, when my father passed away, I was, and still am, you know, a couple years later, very grief-stricken about that, right? You feel that loss very intimately all the time every day.

Because that person is part of your life all the time every day. Whereas with media characters, they're not really a part of your whole life in the same way. We know them in that very specific context. And so that would indicate a lesser degree of closeness that would, you certainly feel the loss at that time,

but you kind of get over it much quicker. Yeah, that makes sense. It's almost like the mechanisms of television, which are very episodic and very kind of in the moment, but then you turn off the TV and go on with your life. I don't know, Megan, but is that still the world we live in where you just turn off the TV and you re-enter reality? Yeah, it is complicated.

I use the phrase IRL, so in real life, all the time to talk about in-person interactions. And really to talk about the physical world as a general environment. But also, the idea of real life, quote, unquote, as a distinctly physical thing can be a little bit misleading because some of the stuff on the web, just as we've been talking about, is real. The people we interact with on it, the topics we might be learning about or debating, they're often real. So the screens are part of our realities. And I think really importantly, they mediate real relationships.

Of course, yeah. I justify a lot of my screen time by a version of what you just said. These are real, meaningful relationships, and they're relationships that I need to be spending time with. For many of us, the screens are unavoidable. I'm looking down right now at my watch that is on my wrist, on my person. They are just around these screens and that makes me think about Marshall McLuhan, who was someone who did so much to shape the way people talk about media today. He talked about screens and really media in general, whether they help us to see each other or hear each other or just know each other, how those mediums become quote unquote extensions of man. And

I think what we're seeing right now is what it really means to have our devices in a very direct and often literal way be extensions of us. Yeah, and we're not really even just experiencing screens more as a part of our lives, but we're bringing more parts of our lives into our screens. Yes, it's no longer just fictional stories or straight ahead news from the streets. Yes. Instead, we're just witnessing people's lives as they choose to share them. We're invited to their living rooms, into their kitchens, medicine cabinets.

And it's just, I think, creating all these new ways of seeing each other, whether in a literal sense or just in a broader way of awareness and connection to other people's lives. sense or just in a broader way of awareness and connection to other people's lives? We're physically looking at other people so much more than we probably ever have. You know, there's this study by a psychologist named Gail Stever that discusses how we're hardwired to become connected to faces and voices, you know, the things that are familiar to us. Huh. And her findings suggest that parasocial connections, like the ones we're talking about, they might

just be natural extensions of this evolutionary instinct that exists in us. Huh. So, if we're constantly being presented with people on our screens, maybe there's just something simply innate in us that leads us to form these attachments. Dr. Fascio, you've studied what people connect with when they watch other people on screen. And I'd love to know what your research found. Is it authenticity that we're seeking? I would say it's primarily the perception of authenticity, in which case how authentic

it actually is doesn't matter really. Oh, interesting. I do have a study where we looked at YouTubers and parasocial attributes, like what they were doing in their videos to sort of cultivate a parasocial relationship. And so if we think about, for example, a YouTuber, a lot of those people start off, if we go back to like 2005, 2006 when YouTube was really just starting, those people are like in their bedrooms with like a janky camera. And it gives this idea like, okay, I'm just a regular person, you're just a regular person,

we're all just regular people together. That industry has changed quite a bit. YouTubers are professionals now. And so authenticity is still that perception like, oh, this is just a regular person like me. Because if you're an influencer, your whole career is based on your ability to create parasocial relationships. Right?

So what we found is that it was a lot of self-disclosure. And we were pretty broad with that. So it didn't have to be like a deep dark secret. It could be something very small. And what we found there was it didn't really matter the type of self-disclosure. So it could be positive things. I had a good day. I did some fun stuff with my friends.

It could be neutral things. I had a good day. I did some fun stuff with my friends, you know. It could be neutral things. I woke up late today. It could be negative things. Didn't really matter. It still built those feelings of authenticity, and that maps social relationships. Generally speaking, if you've got a friend, you know some positive things, some negative things, some neutral things about them. I wonder, too, about the lines then between sort of the parasocial relationship of today and the celebrity. You know, the celebrity is such an old idea, and I think many viewers and many audiences

felt some kind of ownership over celebrities, at least their images, their PR realities, all that kind of stuff. So what are some of the differences between the modern parasocial relationship and the longstanding celebrity relationship? So if we think about, we go back to the golden age of cinema. If you look into it, it's really wild what the movie studios of the time, how much control they had over stars' lives. And they would do things like arrange marriages.

So they had this crazy control. So the images were very, very curated. Now, there's just so much more access. And part of it, you know, when you think about an influencer, they are inviting people into their lives in a certain way. And there is that feeling of this is authentic, this is real, in a way that, you know, 1920s Hollywood doesn't feel because it was so carefully constructed. And I think that authenticity kind of builds these parasocial relationships in a way that

is interesting and unique. This idea of celebrity, it is still, that is also a parasocial relationship, but it is a little bit different because unlike our traditional understanding of influencers, celebrity is sort of on a pedestal. Like, it's hard to imagine, like, Beyonce shopping at Publix. I don't know. That would kind of break your brain a little bit. It really would, yes. In a way that that's not true with like influencers because of that sort of perception of authenticity a little bit more.

Oh, that totally makes sense. It makes me wonder too if parasocial relationships and influencers as they are having more influence over everything, you know, if that will change our ideas about celebrity too. I mean, maybe the celebrities of the future, even the Beyoncé levels of celebrity in the future, you know, will be shopping at Publix and will actually make a point of showing us that they shop at Publix, you know, to perform authenticity in that way. Well, I mean, I remember, so when Leo Messi moved to play at Inter Miami, somebody like posted a video of him at Publix, and everybody's like, oh my gosh, how cool, he's at

Publix, you know, one of the most famous people in the world. And they shop at Publix. I think people actually really respond to stuff like that. This is a real person, he shops at Publix. Social media has changed the amount of access we get with celebrities. Megan, there's sort of this inversion happening in which maybe influencers who gained followers by being quote-unquote authentic and letting you into their lives are now curating their lives more similarly to how the studios and the actors have traditionally done. And celebrities who have historically been very curated and manicured are showing us

parts of their lives that are more authentic. Yes, definitely. I think that's such a good point. And I also wonder whether the inversion you're describing is also just a matter of technological logistics, just a function basically of the way we now interact with each other through screens. This is something else that Marshall McLuhan talked about. We may think about technology as gadgets that we build and use and most importantly that

we control. But he said that tech also controls us. Oh, yeah. Like technology basically has an ideology baked into it in some way where each new piece of technology, whether it's a newspaper or a radio or a TV or a smartphone, has assumptions basically baked into it about how the human should interact with it. Yes.

And when we interact with those devices over time, that kind of conditions us to live according to those assumptions, according to the way that the technology, you know, guides us to live. So print mediums encourage us to think in ways that are basically, you know, printy, linear, logical. Right. And screen mediums are much more visceral and immediate. Yeah.

And, you know, what about AI? Where is that going to fit into all of this? You know, like right now there's just a lot of discussion around how AI is learning about us through these large language models, but how is it gonna impact the way we think and how we look for connection? Yes, yes, yes. We're in this moment right now where it's actually becoming quite hard for people to discern instantly if something is even AI or not. Yeah, yep.

So what do we call that relationship? Mmm, I asked Dr. Fascio about that. I wanted to know especially if the relationships that people are building with AI could still be considered parasocial. Or if, as the bots learn how to imitate human connection, we should think differently about our relationships with AI. It is parasocial in so much as that it's one-sided, which is part of the definition of what parasocial is. Yeah.

But because the illusion of it being two-sided is so much deeper than like you're watching somebody on TV, right? Yeah, yeah. So if we think about like a chat bot talking to you and you talking to it, it certainly seems more social in one sense because you're talking and getting a response.

But generally speaking, they don't have memory in the same way that humans do and they don't build relationships the same way humans do as of right now. I'm sure, you know, I'm not like an AI person who's designing and developing AI and so they might listen to this and be like, just you wait. Yeah, that's right. There's a bot that's remembering you right now. Yeah, I'm like, I'm going to train my bot right now. Promise I'm not a bot. AI definitely feels like another evolution of the technology and the tools that we've seen.

And just like with those other tools and with those other technologies and that other evolution, it's really a bit incumbent on us as people who are using those tools and technologies to make sure that we're not forming any sort of, you know, bad relationship to it. Like, we've got to check ourselves. Just like, you know, anybody could have a potentially bad relationship in a parasocial relationship where they take it too far. With AI, we're going to have to do the same thing. Oh, I love that comparison.

You know, we learn in adulthood to build boundaries in those relationships to protect ourselves often and to manage our vulnerabilities, yeah, and our intimacies, and protect other people too. And maybe we are in the kind of pre-teen phase of figuring out the relationship that we have with AI. Mm, the pre-teen phase, the most fun phase to go through. And maybe hardest too, yeah.

Interestingly it's also the phase when we're shifting our relationships to be more personal in nature. You know, researchers have found that this is the time when you're sharing more intimate thoughts with people outside of your families. You know, you're letting more people into your inner life. So actually maybe describing this time with our devices as a sort of adolescence is really appropriate. Yeah. And adolescence is also so, like, future-oriented, right?

So much of that phase of life isn't just about the relationships you're forging in that moment, but it's also about looking ahead and sort of figuring out who you want to be, who you want to become. And I think that's really useful here, too, to think about just as we sort of consider what kind of digital adulthood we want to create together and especially what types of relationships we want to be building with each other. I actually think it's really important that we're not too quick to demonize this behavior. Like, what's really become clear to me in this conversation is that parasocial relationships,

they're actually fine and normal to have. I mean, for some people, yes, there's going to be a small risk of these relationships turning dysfunctional. But largely, parasocial relationships, they fulfill some sort of need that we seem to have in our lives. Yes. And a really profound need too, I think.

Yeah, as we've been talking about. And I've been thinking too, we tend to talk about social media and bots and the web in general as these things that are totally new and, you know, unprecedented and therefore so hard to figure out. But the machines are really just new tools for doing this very ancient thing, which, like you said, is connecting with each other. Humans are social animals and we will find ways to be social, whether it's on a Zoom call in person or, I don't know, on a podcast.

Oh. Well, it's been really nice connecting with you, Megan. It's been nice connecting with you too, Andrea. That's all for this episode of How to Know What's Real. This episode was hosted by Andrea Valdez and me, Megan Garber. Our producer is Natalie Brennan. Our editors are Claudina Bade and Jocelyn Frank. Fact check by Anna Alvarado.

Our engineer is Rob Smirciak. Rob also composed some of the music for this show. The executive producer of audio is Claudina Bade and the managing editor of audio is Andrea Valdes. Next time on How to Know What's Real. When we go online, you know, there's joy in interacting with the people we know. But there's also pleasure to, you know, what I think of as that, you know, the digital street, right? The ability to just see other people living their lives in ways that you're just like, wow, that's different, and I'm intrigued. What we can learn from urbanization

about how to live in a crowded and bustling digital world. Back with you on Monday.