A close friend of mine once cried so dramatically when I told her she would never marry the lead singer of her favourite metal band that you’d have thought she’d just been jilted. Granted, we were 13 and she was in the depths of hormonal angst, but her reaction was genuine nonetheless. Somewhere in her journey to becoming a devoted fan of the band’s music, she’d developed a personal connection with the frontman and become convinced they were meant for each other. Their music was so important to her that she assumed there must be more to it. How could she feel this strongly and not be destined to know him personally? The realisation that millions of other people also felt he was singing directly to them, and that the direction of adoration all went one way, was incredibly painful for her, and somewhat hilarious for me.
This is, I think, a good example of a parasocial relationship – a term coined by social scientists in 1956 to describe the way some people reacted to the new level of access TV and film gave them to their favourite performers. These new visual media offered “an illusion of intimacy”, allowing the audience to be more than just spectators – they felt as if they knew these celebrities. A bond was created, one that has mushroomed since. Back then, access was still tightly controlled. However strong your lust for Elvis, there was a line that couldn’t be crossed. The information you might glean about the snake-hipped singer was meted out in gushing magazine interviews, presided over by cautious managers.
The tabloid press may have driven a bulldozer through that model of gatekeeping, but social media blew it up almost completely. One look at Instagram or TikTok shows the majority of these sites are designed to feel intimate, as though you’re in direct contact with your favourite celebrity. In the desperate quest to be relatable, many high-profile people now offer up more and more of their personal lives online, hoping their fans will like them more for it. Megastars such as Taylor Swift breadcrumb details through their music and social media, but likability is paramount to success for anyone who makes their living online. What better way to make people like you than to offer up the illusion of connection? Talk straight to camera, look into the eyes of your adoring fans. Sell them the facsimile of real friendship, then sell them your limited jewellery drop.
With a few hundred thousand followers myself, I have some experience of parasocial relationships. My first book came out in 2019, an account of life with anxiety and OCD, and the publisher suggested it would be a good idea to have an Instagram account to promote it. My early posts were all about mental health, an attempt to create a space where people could hear about my experience and perhaps talk about their own, but I didn’t have a clear plan, and in the way that social media is wont to do, it got away from me. I was deluged with messages from people who wanted to tell someone their own experience of mental illness. I realised that writing a book about it wasn’t enough; there was an expectation from some that it should be a two-way street, and so I replied to every single message, feeling somehow that ignoring them would be a betrayal. How helpful this was, I don’t know. Perhaps sharing such pain with me was easier than opening up to a real friend, and I didn’t want anyone to think I wasn’t listening.
But it quickly became apparent that it wasn’t always possible for me to set the tone. People would start to tell me I’d let them down, or behaved in a way they didn’t expect from me. After any post expressing a particular view (recently, a story supporting trans women), someone will invariably let me know that they’ll be unfollowing me. It usually begins with, “I used to really like you but … ” It’s always strange when it happens, as if I’m being told I’m not being the me they expect me to be.
* * *
The first time, I felt foolish, like I’d strayed out of my lane. But often I’m left feeling defensive, angry even. When I was in hospital recovering from a burst appendix last September, a lot of people sent me lovely get-well messages, and doctors and nurses offered indispensable advice, at a time when I felt incredibly vulnerable. I’ll always remember how kind these professionals were to a random person on the internet. But it’s hard to forget the woman who sent me a brief missive expressing sympathy, then followed up a few days later, furious that I hadn’t replied to her. I was incredulous. I was fighting off infection, I replied; what did she want from me? I imagine what she wanted was a two-way interaction, and I hadn’t fulfilled my side of that supposed bargain.
Since then, I find I’m second-guessing myself when I post, wondering whether it is the kind of content people want, curating, in some uncomfortable way, the idea I hope people have of me. Funny, hopefully. Entertaining somehow. And that is the problem. Social media, with the best will in the world, cannot give an entirely accurate image of someone. In a quest to be “yourself” online, you might find you move further away from who you really are.
I once posted about a book I was reading, implying I was enjoying it more than I actually was, and was inundated with similar recommendations. Why did I post about a book I didn’t much care for? To signal I had my finger on the pulse? Maybe just to be liked, which is not a reason to read anything.
I post about mental illness, a bit of politics, sometimes a nice outfit or interesting doors I see on my daily runs, and my dog probably shows up more than is necessary. All of this is a little of who I am – not the whole story – but it’s all some people will ever see and as a result, they assume they have the measure of me.
Often, it’s nice: I like it when people send me helpful recommendations or their advice on my ailing fig tree (Instagram saved it from certain death), but sometimes it all can get a little weird. I’ve had messages from strangers telling me I’ll regret being childless, or recommending I stop taking anti-anxiety medication in favour of herbs and vitamins. These kinds of messages are always written as though from a close friend, as if we have a personal relationship rather than a limited online connection.
Sometimes people invite me to lunch, or suggest we walk our dogs together, which makes me feel guilty, as if I’ve invited them to believe we have that level of intimacy. I try to respond with kindness, but it cannot be truly kind to unwittingly trick someone into thinking that’s a possibility, can it? A few times I’ve had to mute or restrict someone who’s messaged too often, the kind of continuous contact you slowly realise has tipped into something unhealthy.
And it’s not often – most interactions are kind, funny and make me feel like social media is still, on balance, worth having – but very occasionally the messages can be unpleasant. I wouldn’t dream of messaging a stranger unprompted, telling them that I disliked their book or hated their laugh, but I’ve had both those land in my inbox and it stings. I remind myself that this person is a stranger and the online nature of the communication blunts our learned politeness, but it still feels odd when somebody dislikes you without truly knowing you.
* * *
Fifty years ago, you might live in ignorant bliss about your favourite celebrities’ political views. Now it’s easy to see just from the things they “like”. I mass unfollowed a bunch of people I really admired when I saw they’d liked Johnny Depp’s valedictory post about winning his lawsuit against Amber Heard, feeling betrayed by this casual sign of support for a man I felt had behaved appallingly. Was this rational? Not really.
When your insights about a person are formed through such an odd lens, is it any wonder the feelings we hold about the strangers we follow can evolve over time from admiration to dislike? The person you thought you “knew” is actually something else entirely, but instead of removing them from your online world, you continue to seek them out.
Forums such as Reddit and Tattle Life thrive as outlets where people can go and bitch about their least favourite stars, and part of me understands why. Watching people already in a privileged position finding success off the back of their social media can be galling, especially when the content they’re putting out comes off as so detached from reality. A Kardashian on a private jet praising God for their many blessings; a pop star showing off shoes that cost more than your rent; an influencer proudly driving a sports car they’ve been kindly gifted. Much of this success is down to their fans, so it makes sense that some people look for places to vent about such behaviour. The illusion of a connection, once severed, can’t be restored. But it can forge a new connection – that of the hate-follow.
Continuing to engage with someone you dislike intensely can veer into obsessional behaviour – people who spend hours every week following and dissecting the intentions of their hate-follow, talking about them as if they can see into their souls. I’ve seen posts about where someone sends their kids to school, their home address or ways to contact their employer, and sometimes it even veers into conspiracy territory. Snark pages posit that marriages are only business arrangements, allege child cruelty, and suggest that online influencers are scamming people deliberately.
My teenage friend felt a passionate love for her favourite singer, but to hate a stranger so passionately takes up the same amount of energy. I’ve done it myself. There are people I’ve never met in real life who I check in on from time to time, just to see if they’re as objectionable as I’ve decided they are in my head. I’ve invented entire personalities and motivations for strangers that have no basis in reality and all it does is take up my time, leaving the target of my projection blissfully unbothered. The option to unfollow or ignore people we dislike is right there; why don’t we take it?
I should know better: I was stalked a few years ago by a man I’d never met, who felt he knew me merely through my online presence. It ended with him visiting my home and spending a year in prison as a result. I never knew why he fixated on me, other than he must have seen a few articles I’d written and felt some connection. It still haunts me that he’d managed to create an entire world where we had a relationship just from some small insights I’d written about my life. In his head we were in love. In reality, I was terrified of him, and the experience has changed how I behave online. I won’t share my family or friends, my live location, or anything that identifies the places I frequent. This isn’t entirely foolproof – people regularly recognise my dog in the local park. I joke he’ll be dognapped; maybe I should cover his face online with a cheery emoji from now on.
* * *
The protagonists of dramatic news stories can also become the subjects of parasocial relationships. It’s most obvious in the true-crime world, a massively popular genre for many reasons – morbid curiosity, giving ourselves a good fright, exploring the darkest part of human nature from the safety of the sofa – but there is also an appeal in feeling a connection with the injured party, especially if they share similar traits or experiences as us. Podcasts and documentaries about gruesome murders prompt people to search for as much information about the victim as possible – scouring the social media pages of relatives, dissecting Google Maps for their last movements and taking to forums to look for theories and possible motives.
There have been many instances where this kind of ghoulish nosiness has tipped over into being actively harmful, such as the case of the Boston marathon bombing, when a group on a Reddit sub decided to become amateur sleuths and incorrectly identified someone as the perpetrator. His sister told the BBC that, as a result, she was called 72 times in the early hours of the morning by strangers accusing her brother, who was missing at the time, of being a terrorist.
When British woman Nicola Bulley went missing while walking her dog in 2023, police criticised “amateur detectives” who visited the scene and even broke into derelict buildings to look for her. But the worst of the behaviour was online, where thousands of messages were posted across social media casting aspersions at Bulley, her husband (who many decided wasn’t suitably upset) and several blameless others. Even after it transpired she had fallen into the river, some commenters still refused to believe it was a tragic accident, talking about the case as if they knew Bulley intimately.
Most recently, when teenager Jay Slater went missing on holiday in Tenerife, parts of the internet went mad, delving into his past, accusing his family of making the whole thing up to profit financially and implying a friend of his had something to do with his disappearance. This kind of behaviour easily mushrooms online, where it’s easy to forget real people are involved in whichever tragedy has become that week’s entertainment.
I’ve explored this behaviour in my new novel, looking at an online amateur sleuth who becomes obsessed with the death of a local businessman and determines to figure out how he died, regardless of her lack of connection to the man. Her information is gleaned from social media posts, which give her an “in” with the family. They have no idea she exists, but that means nothing. An armchair detective has everything she needs from their digital footprint.
This kind of parasocial relationship is much less defensible to me. If you’re putting parts of your life on display in order to promote your work, there has to be an acceptance that some people will feel very strongly connected to you, be that positively or negatively. A victim of crime has no agency at all, yet the boundary of what feels comfortable is repeatedly crossed in our endless fascination with murder.
You can’t put the genie back in the bottle, but every time I get the urge to delve into the life of a total stranger, I remember a message I got a few years ago on Instagram. Her sister had been murdered, the woman told me, and the media had covered it heavily. One day she was in a shop changing room and overheard two girls in the next cubicle discussing her sister’s death, talking as if they knew her personally. This particular parasocial interaction had crossed over into real life and caused real pain, and it has always served me as a good reminder to be cautious when viewing the lives and deaths of strangers as entertainment.
For the most part, I consider myself very lucky. I find social media to be a joyful place where the majority of people I interact with are thoughtful and clever. Over the past few years my mental health has been fairly terrible and the kindness of strangers has been invaluable. But no matter how lovely the parasocial relationships you build online can appear to be, you can’t forget they’re a shiny illusion. Because I share things online, because my husband has a fairly high-profile job, because my dog is adorable, a person might come to think they have true ingress into our lives. And the same is true for me when others share snippets about their lives and I assume I have them all figured out. It’s a tightrope to walk, one where I have to remind myself that while I am not a real friend to my followers, they are also not a real friend to me. The connection is genuine, but it’s forged on unequal and shifting ground.
• Bella Mackie’s new novel, What a Way to Go, is published on 12 September by Borough Press at £20. To support the Guardian and Observer, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
