The Pitfalls of Parasocial Perceptions

That's a lot of fucking "Ps", but hear me out.

Photo by Braydon Anderson on Unsplash

I caught up with an old friend this week.

He and I met at the height of social media’s popularity when Twitter was new and hot, blogs were cool, and SxSW was a small, nerdy conference that we all used as a reunion of sorts to wear cowboy hats and drink beer and misfire DMs for the person we were trying to hook up with after a party.

My friend said that I was one of the few who had been “popular” and known online at the time who actually built a legit career after.

But it made me chuckle a bit because the truth is I had a fucking legit career before that, too. I was actually doing the work I talked about. For years prior.

But most people didn’t bother to know or care about that at the time; I was some bouncy chick with a marketing blog and I said pithy things on social media and so everyone just assumed I knew what I was talking about and/or that I had drunk-staggered my way into marketing like a lot of my pseudo-peers at the time and was making it the fuck up as I went along. And that was fine. Because I was interesting, or early, or both.

The thing about online popularity and influence is that it’s a very strong, hard-to-penetrate veneer.

People see the persona and the platform, but rarely the human. During my 15 minutes, people recognized me on the street in Austin at SxSW. One woman fucking cried when we first met.

It’s jarring and at times really fucking unsettling when you examine how much we are desperate for people who we can relate to or who we perceive to be “someone” to notice or like us.

Many people in my circles found the same accidental popularity but tried to go all in and make that the sum total of their careers (not to mention identities). Some succeeded. Many didn’t.

Whole lots of people who initially liked my persona came to hate me as a human when I’d didn’t live up to some expectation they’d built up in their head for how a popular-ish online person should behave. In fact, I’ll never forget the woman who had never met or spoken to me but DRAGGED me in mutual circles and very loudly online because I hadn’t responded to one of her comments on my blog. Like…what in the actual fuck kind of warped perspective is that?

(Ironically she asked me for a professional favor a few years ago and I did it without saying a word because I’m not a fucking piece of trash yet I wondered silently if she remembered how much she’d shit-talked me to our mutuals for literal years before she needed something from me. Ahem. Anyway.)

I eventually faded into obscurity because I refused to keep tirelessly chasing the popularity contest online. I realized how much I actively disliked some of the people I was associating with and how disingenuous they were, and I started saying so. And once I realized how fucking fake, mean, superficial and judgmental the crowd could be—and how very, very fucking close I came to becoming one of them—the more I wanted to be really fucking far away from all of that. I had to do a massive reckoning with who I was, what I was ostensibly chasing, who I was associating with, and how narrow the margin was becoming between who I really was and a person I really fucking hated.

Many of those people still actively dislike me to this day. Some of it is probably justified. The rest of it I’m at peace with.

All this to say:

Your favorite “influencer” or account on the interwebs is just a human. Some of them are truly good humans. Some of them are not. All of them are dealing with shit you have no idea about. Many of them are desperately trying to find validation in the approval of strangers on the internet. Some of them have sipped their own kool-aid for too long. Others have a very tenuous relationship with their online persona and grapple constantly with trying to be accessible and visible while staying authentic and true to themselves because they’re legitimately trying to do something positive in the world.

It’s really easy to judge a person from your micro impressions of them online. And it’s easy to forget how small and narrow that vantage point really is. It comes to light every time the crowd puts those people on a pedestal and then just as swiftly and viciously tears them the fuck down, almost as if they were eagerly and hungrily awaiting the opportunity to do so.

Media literacy today includes understanding this dynamic and remembering that you might see a person on the internet and think you understand who they are. You likely…really fucking do not.

Some people deserve their popularity. Others exploit it and others.

But no matter which it is, the one core truth is that you need to get the fuck offline and know people as humans away from screens. It’s essential. In fact, I think it might be one of the very things that can drag us out of this hunch-necked morass of parasocial relationships, reactionary judgment, incendiary confrontation and thin-skinned whiny bitch behavior that the social media sphere has created.

These platforms are warping so much more than our perceptions of each other and it fucking worries me.

Every fucking day.

Now stop reading this and go touch some fucking grass or something. No one is coming to save us but ourselves.

Love and angst,

Amber