Parasocial Media
526 words.
I was watching a recent episode of The Rest is Entertainment, a new-ish podcast that’s also a YouTube channel, in the standard way of modern podcasts:
They got on the subject of content addiction and it reminded me of my decision to largely drop out of participating in social media this year and how it’s affected me.
To be clear, I’ve never been the sort of content addict that they were talking about on the podcast. I don’t and have never scrolled through TikTok for hours a day, for example, the quintessential example of the content addict and prisoner of “the algorithm.”
I don’t scroll through TikTok for a minute a day. I view one TikTok channel maybe once every couple weeks or once a month, and that’s the extent of my usage there.
To be honest, I barely use a phone at all. I’m at home almost all of my time, so there’s rarely any great need to pick up my phone, except for two-factor authentication. My phone is due for an upgrade and I’m not even sure I have a working data plan anymore, because I always have to download podcasts to listen to them for the 15 minutes it takes to drive to a grocery store. Otherwise it keeps complaining of no connection, and who can be bothered to figure that out.
I have no difficulty skipping videos that look like they’re supposed to make me mad in YouTube recommendations.
My peak personal social media addiction story is when I looked at Twitter every morning and throughout the day when I had a spare moment, just to see what was going on in the world. Though I didn’t fall too often into “doom-scrolling.”
This year I’ve almost entirely stopped. I don’t look at Twitter anymore. I also don’t look at Mastadon or Bluesky or whatever else is out there now. I don’t even miss any of it anymore. Life goes on.
At first it seemed like I was missing something by not knowing the news of the day the instant it happened. But it turns out it’s actually okay to hear news a day or two later. The world, it seems, continues to function without any input from me on an ongoing 24/7 basis.
This year I’ve been taking the entire concept of parasocial interactions to heart. It turns out that following people on social media isn’t really socializing. It doesn’t matter how much you think people might know you, in actual fact, people on the Internet probably think you’re weird and don’t want to hang out with you, and it seems increasingly sensible to approach social media that way.
So I’ve been trying to stay away from the form of parasocial relationship that breeds from follower-based social media. I’m going back to the old-fashioned kind: The kind you get by watching video content. Television shows, or things like actual plays, or even podcasts. You know, the kind your parents and grandparents understood.
It’s probably still not great, but at least I can listen to the shows in question while I’m doing other things.
Archived Comments
Bhagpuss 2024-08-17T07:33:14Z I’m basically the same except that I made my break with social media in the early 2000s, when I realised I was spending two hours a night after work in Yahoo Groups and not enjoying it at all. I was also getting heavily into online games, which gave me all the online socialising I could handle and more and not a single person in my offline friend groups had the slightest interest in any of that, so one of them had to go. You can guess which. Consequently I never joined MySpace or Facebook or any of the others and I only have a Twitter account because a game I wanted to play required it to make an account. Around the pandemic I also stopped listening to, reading or watching general news reports as well and I can’t say I have missed it for a moment. Conversely, since we got a dog a couple of years ago I am now on chatting terms with a whole load of neighbors who I’d never spoken to in the previous 25 years we’ve lived here.
Bhagpuss 2024-08-17T07:33:56Z I’m basically the same except that I made my break with social media in the early 2000s, when I realised I was spending two hours a night after work in Yahoo Groups and not enjoying it at all. I was also getting heavily into online games, which gave me all the online socialising I could handle and more and not a single person in my offline friend groups had the slightest interest in any of that, so one of them had to go. You can guess which. Consequently I never joined MySpace or Facebook or any of the others and I only have a Twitter account because a game I wanted to play required it to make an account. Around the pandemic I also stopped listening to, reading or watching general news reports as well and I can’t say I have missed it for a moment. Conversely, since we got a dog a couple of years ago I am now on chatting terms with a whole load of neighbors who I’d never spoken to in the previous 25 years we’ve lived here.
Endgame Viable 2024-08-21T12:16:55Z Sorry Bhagpuss! I only just realized a bunch of your comments were sitting in moderation in GraphComment. Still learning how it works.
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