PARA-ANTISOCIALITY: HATRED, CELEBRITY, PROJECTION, ATTRACTION, IMPOTENCE, AND CATHARSIS IN LIMINAL SOCIETIES

Abstract

The last three decades of media expansion and technological innovation, encompassing the 24-hour media news cycle, the original desktop- and later site-based internet, gaming, social media, and the smartphone, have radically altered the means by which citizens of the developed and developing world access information and how they construct and maintain relationships. As the reach, robustness, ubiquity, and engagement potential of the two-dimensional world have expanded, those of the three-dimensional world have diminished (an effect accelerated during the COVID and post-COVID eras). As one world atrophies, a new one rushes in to fill the void. Celebrity culture; neoliberal economic policies; the decline of family, community, and organised religion; and the post-World War II suburbanisation and aesthetic sterilisation of shared spaces have all contributed to the decay and fragilization of the antecedent meat space (in-person) bonds. In their place, has risen the parasocial relationship—that between audience and performer or, in more modern terminology, content creator and content consumer. Why celebrities/content creators are loved is not the question to be posed herein. Notoriety, adulation, status, physical attractiveness, and charm—these all do much to explain why the famous and would-be famous alike are regarded with affection. Why they are hated—as they often are, if only by a portion of their audience—is less clear. This paper will examine the origins and utility of antagonistic parasocial relationships as well as the extent to which para-antisociality is harmful to content creators and consumers and what (if anything) can and should be done to manage hostility in parasocial relationships.

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