DIGITAL RESIDUES

The parasocial dynamic has gone lateral, turning peers into projections and conversations into narratives

By Megan Hullander

In the post-postmodern condition—call it late late capitalism or networked neorealism—there is an increasingly frequent stutter that occurs when encountering a person one ostensibly knows. You see the face, you know the facts (the new job, the thing with their mom, their dog’s gluten allergy), but you don’t really know the person anymore. Because it’s not them you’ve been encountering; it’s their digitized emissary: a composite echo shaped by public disclosures, edited for emotional coherence and aesthetic plausibility. It’s Baudrillard by way of Canva. It is, in a way, kind of parasocial.

Let’s break it down etymologically. Para meaning beside or beyond. Social, from Latin socius—companion, ally, comrade. So: “beside-companion.” Near, but never touching.

There was, back in the analog dust of the mid-20th century, a clean verticality to parasociality. The term (Horton & Wohl, 1956) emerged in the era of monolithic broadcast media, when viewer and subject were clearly differentiated by access, authority, and lighting design. It described the curious phenomenon of believing, on some level, that you shared a relationship with someone utterly unaware of your existence—a phantom intimacy, all projection. You watched Cronkite; you trusted Cronkite; you did not expect Cronkite to comment “haha so true” under a meme you reposted.

But parasociality has expanded beyond strangers. What we’re dealing with now is murkier, more spiritually scrambled: the parasociality of the once familiar. Idol worship has become entangled with acquaintance estrangement. You once co-authored a hangover, learned how to illegally torrent things together, shared a spoon. Now, you’re engaging primarily with this person’s content. You consume their lives in the same way you consume those of celebrities—that is, passively, incessantly, through panes of glass and streams of content. And then, in the double exposure of meeting someone IRL who you’ve been “keeping up with” online, you greet them already updated. Conversation becomes less about revelation so much as resynchronization.

That tension of closeness without contact helps frame how we portray ourselves today. Think of Erving Goffman’s The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life: His dramaturgical model imagined social life as theater, where we perform different selves depending on the audience. But that framework is tidy compared to the current ontological sprawl. Our “fronts” are both role-specific (work self, family self, friend self) and platform-specific, curated for performance metrics and reified in UI. There’s Instagram, where you’re aspirational but totally chill about it; X, where you’re ironic, bitter, and briefly fascinating; TikTok, where you’re weirdly sincere; LinkedIn, where you’re pious and upwardly mobile.

What we’re living through is the natural next phase of postmodern life. Fredric Jameson predicted it as the “waning of affect,” where emotion is flattened into an aesthetic. Guy Debord saw it coming too, describing a world where images replace real experience. Now, we generate those images ourselves. We’re the brand and the audience.

Reality television is an unsettlingly apt ancestor of this mode of selfhood. Shows like Big Brother and Keeping Up with the Kardashians normalized the omnipresence of cameras, and trained us to expect—demand even—a particular kind of transparency: a staged intimacy, offering the illusion of closeness without the burden of truth. And somewhere along the way, that logic leaked off the soundstage and onto the sidewalk. The idea that life is always being documented is no longer a production gimmick, but a baseline social assumption. The ouroboros of human connection has swallowed its own tail and started livestreaming the digestion process.

This relentless self-exposure encourages an inward turn, where performance crowds out genuine connection. Instead of opening us up, it leaves us isolated—caught in a cycle of self-concern so consuming that it fragments our sense of belonging. If all of this sounds bleak or entirely unprecedented, well, that’s only partly true. Some of this distance we feel is just life. People lose touch; friendships fade out. What’s new is that the fading doesn’t really feel like absence anymore. The distance quietly unfolds beneath the surface.

There’s something faintly necropolitical about the persistence of identity after the relationship has died. The philosopher Achille Mbembe talks about “social death” as the exclusion of people from political life; in digital culture, we might experience a kind of relational death, where connection ceases but presence persists. The affective residue remains, unanchored from actual interaction. These shadows are emotionally uncanny and economically useful. They drive engagement; they populate algorithms.

The tendency to narrativize the self for distant consumption predates the internet. See: the Victorian epistolary novel, the confessional poetry of Sylvia Plath, or, if you want to be generous and continental, Montaigne’s essays. But the internet industrialized the impulse, rendered it ubiquitous, involuntary, and monetizable. The line between self-expression and brand management collapsed into the pastel void of Stories and Feeds and algorithmic recommendation engines that reward consistency over earnestness.

What’s particularly brutal, in a quiet, almost imperceptible way, is how this ambient intimacy collapses when the glossy façade begins to crack, just slightly, and the person behind the persona appears. Someone you follow religiously loses a parent or posts a grayscale photo and a caption that just says “not okay.” And you freeze. Because, despite your saturation in someone’s narrative, you aren’t narratively necessary. Parasociality rears its cold, clean face.

Maybe “parasocial” isn’t the right word here. Maybe we need a neologism. Something like perisocial (from peri-, “around”), suggesting an orbit that never quite touches down. Or metasocial, indicating the doubled-up nature of how we relate: to the person and to the version of themself they are constantly updating. Or hypersocial, which sounds clinical but might be apt: excessively, artificially connected—a saturated simulation of intimacy.

This ambient intimacy emerges from what Shoshana Zuboff calls “surveillance capitalism.” Platforms incentivize disclosure because it improves data yield; the alleged connection it fosters is perfunctory. This intimacy is a kind of social vaporware, and tech companies adore it. The promises of Zuckerberg’s Metaverse aside, the real product has always been sociality without friction: the appearance of community without its annoying logistical or emotional costs.

Still, even in this fog of performance and proxies, there’s a thread worth tugging. Because awareness of the distortion can become a kind of resistance. If you know that your friend’s exhausting self-branding efforts are, at bottom, a way of whispering “please think I’m valuable,” then maybe you can look at them with actual affection, or even gratitude.

That crack becomes even clearer when someone sends you a letter, with handwriting that is slightly embarrassing in its sincerity. Or a conversation veers into some unexpected and slightly awkward cul-de-sac, and you both follow it. And afterward, you feel cracked open in this weirdly good way. Like you exercised a muscle you forgot you had.

And maybe that’s the point. Real connection is awkward. It’s full of pauses and course corrections. The way back to it might take shape in a series of small, embarrassing choices to be a little less cool and a little more real.

Sometimes, talking is just talking. And you don’t want to scroll. You want to stay.