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Episode 1: Shitty Imaginary Friends
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Episode 1: Shitty Imaginary Friends

Welcome to whatever the hell this is.

Note: When I recorded this, I was not sure if this would exist as audio-only or a video, if I would upload this to YouTube or share this on Substack. And the conclusion I’ve come to for now is just to do both and say fuck it.

Transcript:

Okay, so this is going to be really fun because camera, monitor, Zoom on my computer. So, I'm going to be looking all over the place apparently.

This is not the first time I've almost reacted really poorly—or did react poorly and then walked that back very quickly, or removed it as quickly as humanly possible—when it comes to someone leaving a comment on a video I've made or something that I've posted.

I don't think I am exempt from human behavior, and I don't think I'm exempt from Internet culture and social Internet behavior.

That being said, I am not one of the only people—by any means—but I feel like I am someone who has a fairly high level of discernment and knowledge and understanding of communication when it comes to the Internet and social media in general.

It's so fascinating to watch myself have such a knee-jerk reaction when someone responds to something I've said and usually my knee-jerk reaction is to assume the worst and not assume good faith.

And then I go back and reread the comment and I'm like, "Holy shit, what if they really didn't mean it this way? What if this person is genuinely asking me this question or they're not thinking of this as seriously as I am, right?"

I do my best to take the opportunity to behave and be an example for what I wish I would see more on the Internet and across social media, which is assuming good faith in others. As well as choosing what battles and conversations to be a part of.

And let me tell you, I can get very hot-headed. I can go off. I have very strong feelings about my opinions and my perspective on things.

The last thing I want to do is exert energy and it be wasted.

I am a firm believer that there are some things you shouldn't say online.

There are some things you should absolutely keep to yourself. There are some things and a lot of thoughts that we all have that don't need to be shared and added to the noise. It's just noise and sometimes noise is okay. It's okay to numb a little bit. It's okay to just escape for a moment.

But if we talk about being chronically online, that's when it becomes a fucking problem.

And it's so fascinating to see myself behave in ways that, like, I understand what's going on. I have this awareness, but that awareness doesn't exempt me from falling into that behavior.

I try really hard, to the best of my ability at the moment, to just be a better person about it. And it's not that I'm any better than the person I'm engaging with or that the person I'm engaging with is not acting in good faith or is an asshole.

At the end of the day, we really have such a hard time imagining the complexities of each other and not thinking of each other as two-dimensional or even three-dimensional beings, whatever the fuck you want to take that for.

And I know I'm going to sometimes sound preachy and I know sometimes I'm going to just—I'm going to come across a ways that I never fucking intended to come across.

But it's going to happen. It is what it is.

I—at the very least—understand the risk involved every time I open my mouth on the internet and frankly, I don't say a lot of shit on the internet. Not like I used to because my relationship with the Internet and my relationship with social media is drastically different than it was a year ago, two years ago, five years ago, ten years ago.

Ten years ago, I started my Instagram account on my iPod Touch my senior year of high school.

Actually ten plus years ago.

I remember following an actress—among other people—but I remember following this actress on Instagram, and I watched her in a show that I really liked, and I would scroll through my Instagram feed again circa like 2011, 2012.

And part of me would have this feeling that I was her friend.

It's not even that I commented on her stuff or liked her stuff. I don't even want to call it content because that has so many connotations when we talk about the Internet and when we talk about social media platforms.

But it's not even when she was sharing her content, it was when she was sharing a fucking picture she took at the beach.

And I scroll past that after scrolling past pictures that my friends that I see every day in school posting…that did something to my brain.

And it did something to all of our brains in that that line blurred and this new iteration of what we understand to be parasocial relationships and parasocial phenomena at large, that was the inception of it, dramatically shifting from what it was originally conceived to be and to be understood.

Parasocial relationships and interactions as they were originally kind of theorized and understood to be at the time—which was like the sixties—unrequited, one-sided and frankly, in the history of communication studies and scholarly study on parasocial phenomenon is a negative lens. It's a negative thing, it has negative results. It's a negative thing on people's lives—which is not entirely true. But it was seen as applicable to public figures, celebrities, politicians, the newscaster on your local news station and fictional characters in media.

But now parasocial relationships are formed with people just like you and me, right? Who have stumbled and hustled their way into some level of success or some level of fame or some level of virality, right?

They've built a community. They then become the figurehead of a social media relationship at large, but then they're also responding to our comments. They're taking our feedback into consideration. They see the things we say about them, and that is a huge difference. Now they're having a parasocial relationship with us, the audience.

It's not one-sided anymore.

Then you have TikTok specifically and people who never fucking intended or imagined or hoped for a moment that they would build a community, that they would be able to build a career off of 60-second clips in the middle of bum-fuck Montana, Wisconsin, Florida, anywhere. They never thought this would happen for them.

And suddenly it did. They're even more like normal, everyday people, leading lives exactly like you and me.

That marked another chapter to the evolution of parasocial relationships.

I wrote something down the other day while I was brushing my teeth. Hold on, let me see if I can find it. It always happens when I'm brushing my teeth, right? Like, that's when the thoughts kind of come through.

Okay, to be totally fair, this doesn't read exactly how I thought it would read, but I left myself a decent enough note to understand what I was getting at.

We're constantly having imaginary conversations.

That's what we're doing. We are having imaginary conversations. It's not even one-sided, they're imagined.

We'll watch a clip of a podcast between two relatively Internet or cultural famous people, and then we post a TikTok responding to a soundbite from that podcast or from a clip from that podcast. Those two people in the clip are having a conversation. They're not having a conversation with me posting a TikTok reacting to it. I'm not a part of the conversation.

And so when you are not a part of a conversation, but you are expanding on it or expounding on it or elaborating on it or sharing your two cents in, something is getting lost there, right?

Something is getting lost in that transmission.

I'm not sitting here criticizing, you know, observing a conversation shared as a piece of content and having your own opinions and reactions and judgments and thoughts and things that you want to add onto it.

But it's a parasocial conversation at best.

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