Para-antisocial?
It's not you; it's deeply, weirdly, shittily me.
I’m assuming, perhaps wrongly, that anyone online enough to read a Substack knows the term parasocial relationship, but just in case, I’ll define it as I understand it: a parasocial relationship is a unidirectional “relationship” that one feels for someone they don’t actually know. The term blew up a few years back both on social media and because of social media, since that’s the current medium most conducive to developing emotional connections to celebrities who post content using the direct address, i.e., writing “you” as if addressing, well, you instead of “targeted demographic whose engagement is necessary to trigger a cascade of monetizable clicks.” Wikipedia tells me, however, that the term was first used decades before the invention of the internet by communication studies professors to describe the deeply personal feelings one might derive from subjects they encountered in mass media.
In any case, I’ve definitely carried on deeply passionate affairs with celebrity figures from afar, beginning with Hans Solo when I was still waddling and ending with the voice of Pedro Pascal in the one season I watched of The Mandalorian. (The fact that the bookends of my arousal-from-a-distance era were both Star Wars-related is a coincidence, unless there’s something subconscious going on.) But in general, I never really belonged to any kind of fandom. I never followed sports teams. I never followed Phish. The pleasure and security of my fantasy love affairs was rooted in the fact that they existed entirely and intentionally in my head, where Hans and Din Djarin could not reject me and where those poor bastards could have no possible say in the filthy things they wanted to do to me. And—honestly, no shade to those who do this, because I 100% read garbage celebrity gossip and engage in that culture in more analog ways—but I never really followed celebrities on social media, mainly because I’ve always been embarrassed to publicly admit a crush (Hans and Din Djarin now excepted) and because I don’t want hard proof of my crushes not knowing or giving a shit about my existence.
This seems like a good enough segue into the real theme of this essay, and of this newsletter in general: my misanthropic assholery around social media in general, and not just in regards to celebrity accounts. Even going back to my earliest online days, I was internet-shy. My forthcoming novel is set in 1999 and involves a character essentially catfishing someone in the search for her brother using the hundreds of AOL CD-Roms we all got in the mail back in those days. I was a teenager and young adult when AOL first emerged, so one might think memory might preclude the need for research about the halcyon days of AOL, but hand to heart, I never once used a chatroom to connect with potential boyfriends in Iowa or Nova Scotia. I might have co-written a porny sentence or two with someone I was present with while we giggled our way through a XXX-chatroom, but the idea of talking to strangers on the internet always filled me with acute, stupid anxiety, even more so than talking to strangers in a Starbucks. I could and did use chat to communicate with actual friends, and I actually was an early adopter of social media (pour a little out for Friendster and Myspace), but that was because the 8 or 12 or 24 people I followed were people I interacted with offline on a regular basis. It didn’t feel like such a performance.
The performance, or at least my consciousness of the performance, started in a glorious time when my real-life social networks began to expand in a way that was thrilling. Grad school. Writers’ conferences. Cool people. People I wanted to seem cool to, not just my long-time best friend’s second-best friend and people I worked service jobs with (many of whom were also probably cool in ways I didn’t care to investigate that deeply at the time). The number of followers grew, but as the MFA program and the writing conferences ended, most of them retracted into acquaintances, and as years passed, distant acquaintances. Almost strangers. Scary internet strangers, some of whom were now quite successful and almost actual celebrities. Like Hans and Pedro, except now, with this pre-established virtual connection, they could actually reject me, and rejection could look like nothing more than not poking a heart symbol on an overly earnest or overly self-deprecating post.
Using that metric, I was rejected a lot, and that will do something to a person.
I’ll truncate the rest and just flatly state that in time, what it did was reveal the pettiest, most self-conscious, most judgmental, most jealous, least generous version of me, and “me” already leans towards a cynicism and fatalism I have to consciously fight every single day. In short, virtual me is para-antisocial: I resist relationships with people online. And I don’t want to let myself become the nasty auntie who construes every positive Instagram post of a real-life human having a good day as some kind of manufactured advertisement for a life that’s superior to mine. I don’t want to dismiss every vulnerable post as an adolescent attention-grab. I wouldn’t do that to 3D humans, but the fact that I emotionally conflate posts of people I truly like with corporations trying to sell me wellness potions and hundred-dollar dog booties means it’s probably for the best that I keep away from social media as much as possible.
I recognize that none of my feelings towards social media are unique or unwritten about, and most semi-conscious people acknowledge the serious trade-offs one makes in an attempt to get or stay connected to a broader community than would otherwise be accessible in our regular daily lives. Yes, we know about the bullying. The erosion of self-esteem. The time robbery. The handing over of one’s data to corporations who can then target users with products the algorithm determined could most address the psychic holes exacerbated by social media. Perhaps the newsletter community has shared or even novel ills, but I thought I’d try on this venue since it seems to me, at this juncture, to allow me to think through things through writing, and to give me an excuse to reaching out to people I want to be connected with in a more substantive way. But in an effort to not be such a jerk, I may also share social media posts that reveal other people’s capacity for internet brilliance. After all, I wouldn’t have seen this little nugget from the fledgling little internet startup called The Onion if not for Instagram.
