Though all of the pieces we read for today have to do with celebrity culture, I’d like to move the focus of this discussion for a moment away from celebrity deaths. Predominantly because, when discussing parasociality invovled with phenomenon like holograms and the utilization of soundbites from dead people, I think we can apply these instances to more quotidian occurrences as well.
Case in point: the mutual friend. Many people in my experience accumulate a wide variety of “mutual friends” via Facebook, Instagram, etc, who they have never met, but nonetheless develop a somewhat tangential relationship with. We become aware of significant or insignificant moments in their lives, their political opinions, their food preferences, date of birth, etc. But the relationship is, to an extent, one dimensional. We cannot conceptualize their “humanity” in its entirety, because they are, and in most cases, will always be, a relational “photograph,” or rather, profile picture to us. Alexandra Sherlock dwells on the notion of para-sociality within celebrity culture, and the way this forms a continuity with Walter Benjamin’s anxieties regarding “aura” and “authenticity” (Sherlock 168). But what if our notion of a person’s “aura” in fact obliterates their entire material reality? How is “aura” defined? In relation to the intrinsic object or to the crowd-sourced perception of the object?
What I mean to say is, to what extent is our real presence actually not that significant in the grieving process for tangential acquaintances? Are we always mourning the holograms of one another if all we are, initially, is holographic to one another? This might be one of those theoretical worm holes that has no end of holes and no resolutions.
But perhaps my conception of parasociality is somewhat skewed. It’s a complex definition that is increasingly complicated by what we are defining as simply “social.”
When I think of the wide majority of my relationships now, many of them have moved from the explicitly social realm to the para-social.