I'm Dreak.
Growing up, did you have an imaginary friend?
I did.
Yeah, I had an imaginary friend who's Nate.
I can't believe I'm an untilie.
Sorry.
I can't believe.
Sorry.
His name was Barfie.
Yes.
I definitely questioned if this imaginary friend thing really happened.
I mean, the name like Barfie, it feels like it could be a total false memory that someone
planted in my head to mess with me.
But when it's come up over the years in conversation with my mom, she thinks maybe
I was trying to say Barbie?
Oh, yes.
Do you have any memory of how he came to be or what he looked like?
No.
I don't remember any of that.
I just, I think it was just too young to really form any real coherent memories about him.
My brother, he's six years older than me.
So I kind of wonder if I maybe made up a friend because, you know, I was lonely when he went
away to elementary school.
And so Barfie wasn't really real.
But Barfie was real company and I think I needed that type of connection for some very
real reason.
Yes, definitely.
And RIP Barfie.
I'm Andrea Valdes.
I'm an editor at The Atlantic.
And I'm Megan Garber, a staff writer at The Atlantic.
This is how to know what's real.
Megan, I know you've been writing about technology and culture for a long time at The Atlantic.
But I feel like these last few years you've really been focused on thinking about truth
and fiction.
Uh-huh.
Yeah.
I mean, you wrote an article last year called, We're Already Living in the Metaverse.
Welcome.
Okay, but tell me more about what you mean by living in the Metaverse.
Yeah.
So I'm thinking of the Metaverse in part as this longstanding dream in the tech worlds.
I hope that when computers get advanced enough, they can create environments where virtual reality
seems less virtual and more reality.
And of course, the tech hasn't quite caught up to that big vision.
But the idea of the Metaverse is what we're navigating right now, I think.
And this idea that one day we would be able to immerse ourselves in our entertainment.
That's the world, I think, that's here.
It's just that the immersion isn't strictly a matter of a single place or platform.
Instead, it's everywhere.
That line between reality and fantasy just feels really blurry right now.
Yes.
There's the obviously insidious stuff.
Like there's the rise of deep fakes, AI-generated scams.
But then there's these slightly murkier areas.
Like our content creators on YouTube and social media showing us their authentic selves
or is it really just a performance?
Yes.
And in some ways, those are age old questions, right?
People have been thinking about the difference between the performed life and real life,
such as it is for centuries and millennia even.
But then exactly like you said, the difference feels hazier now than it's ever been.
I think so much of that has to do with technology.
I think about the line all the worlds of stage and that used to be a metaphor, but it's becoming
ever more literal.
Imaginary friends seem so childlike and so kind of fanciful and fantastical.
But it does occur to me that we have versions of them, right?
Even as adults, totally.
I'm thinking about, for example, the people I follow on social media.
I know in some ways very intimate details about their lives.
I know what's in their medicine cabinets, what they have for breakfast.
And of course, they know nothing about me.
They don't know even that I exist.
Do you have people in your life, Andrea, that you feel connected to in that way?
Yeah.
Of course.
There's like a lot of folks that are listening.
I listen to several podcasts and I feel really close to the host of those podcasts.
And it makes me just feel like I really know them.
And like there's a couple of running influencers that I follow on Instagram.
And one of them just finished the Boston marathon and I was so proud of her.
And it's just really strange to say that even because she's a total stranger.
I mean, I guess I can be proud of this relative stranger, but I just knew so much about her
ambition and her goals.
So yeah, it's totally weird.
And with the podcasters, I mean, they're in my ears every week.
So I feel like I have this sort of like standing date with them.
Yes.
And I think a key thing with all those relationships is that the quote unquote friends you're describing
are kind of real and imaginary at the same time.
So their relationships definitely and they're giving you a lot of what IRL friendships can.
But also the relation aspect is so different from what it would be IRL.
And I wonder what are those relationships we're building with these people we don't really
know?
A pair of social relationship is essentially this sort of simulated relationship.
So Andrea, I talked with Dr. Ariane Fascio, she is an assistant professor of communications
at Florida State University and she's been studying emerging media and especially the
feelings of closeness that so many of us get just by watching strangers on a screen, even
with something as commonplace is watching the news.
The news anchor is talking to the screen like they're talking to you.
This sort of simulates a back and forth because they are looking right at you.
They might use words like our community, lots of we and us and like inclusive language
like that.
So it simulates kind of a social interaction, but it's not.
It's actually one sided.
Dr. Fascio, when did your interest in parasocial relationships really begin?
Through a series of kind of weird and unfortunate, not unfortunate, really fortunate events, I wound
up having an on campus job and at first I wanted something like really easy that I wouldn't
have to do a lot, but all those were taken.
So I wound up as an undergraduate assistant to a professor there by the name of Dr. Megan
Sanders and we worked on this study related to this character on the TV show House.
The character kind of abruptly committed suicide on the show and was gone off the show.
This is not a real person.
The actor of course is fine, but people really mourning that character.
He was played by Calpin.
I remember because he left.
That's right.
Yeah, he left to go work for Obama.
So they killed him off the show.
People actually set up these Facebook pages that were memorial pages.
It was virtually indistinguishable from like a memorial page you would set up for a friend.
Like I'm going to miss you so much talking directly to the person, but is that same sort
of idea when that character that we are really fond of is kind of taken away?
People really do kind of react like they are just another person that they know.
I've certainly felt that and for me as a viewer, it's a little bit hard to process that
feeling because I sort of question its validity.
I know this is fiction.
This is fake.
Why do I care so much?
But it is a loss.
It goes back to sort of evolutionary biology and psychology.
Essentially evolution happens over millions of years.
Right?
It takes a long time.
But when we think about the history of television, that hasn't been around that long in the grand
scheme of things.
I mean, my parents were like there when television started.
So you kind of have this situation where consciously, yes, we know this is not real.
This character might be dead, but the actors fine.
But our lizard brains in a way don't really know the difference.
So do our minds, I mean, like how do they distinguish even?
I mean, between the sort of factual person and the fictional person or is the point that
they simply don't?
Yeah.
On some level, they don't.
Based on what I know about parasocial relationships, I think it's a matter of closeness to some degree.
You know, when my father passed away, I was and still am, you know, a couple years later,
a very grief-stricken about that, right?
You feel that loss very intimately all the time every day.
But because that person is part of your life all the time every day, whereas with media
characters, there are not really a part of your whole life in the same way.
We know them in that very specific context.
And so that would indicate a lesser degree of closeness that would, you certainly feel
the loss at that time, but you kind of get over it much quicker.
Yeah.
That makes sense.
It's almost like the mechanisms of television, which are very, you know, episodic and very
kind of in the moment, but then you turn off the TV and go on with your life.
I don't know, Megan, but is that still the world we live in?
Where you just turn off the TV and you re-enter reality?
Yeah.
It is complicated.
I use the phrase IRL, so in real life, all the time to talk about in-person interactions.
And really to talk about the physical world as a general environment, but also the idea
of real life, quote unquote, as a distinctly physical thing can be a little bit misleading
because some of the stuff on the web, just as we've been talking about, is real.
The people we interact with on it, the topics we might be learning about or debating, they're
often real.
So the screens are part of our realities.
And I think really importantly, they mediate real relationships.
Of course.
Yeah.
I justify a lot of my screen time by a version of what you just said.
These are real, meaningful relationships and their relationships that I need to be spending
time with.
For many of us, the screens are unavoidable.
I'm looking down right now at my watch that is on my wrist, on my person.
They are just around these screens.
And that makes me think about Marshall McCluen, who was someone who did so much to shape
the way people talk about media today.
He talked about screens and really media in general, whether they help us to see each
other or hear each other or just know each other, how those mediums become quote unquote
extensions of man.
And I think what we're seeing right now is what it really means to have our devices
in a very direct and often literal way be extensions of us.
Yeah.
And we're not really even just experiencing screens more as a part of our lives, but we're
bringing more parts of our lives into our screens.
Yes.
It's no longer just fictional stories or straight ahead news from the streets.
Yes.
Instead, we're just witnessing people's lives as they choose to share them.
We're invited to their living rooms, into their kitchens, medicine cabinets.
And it's just I think creating all these new ways of seeing each other, whether in a literal
sense or just in a broader way of awareness and connection to other people's lives.
We're physically looking at other people so much more than we probably ever have.
There's this study by a psychologist named Gail Steaver that discusses how we're hard
wired to become connected to faces and voices, the things that are familiar to us.
And her findings suggest that parosocial connections, like the ones we're talking about, they
might just be natural extensions of this evolutionary instinct that exists in us.
So if we're constantly being presented with people on our screens, maybe there's just
something simply innate in us that leads us to form these attachments.
Dr. Fashow, you've studied what people connect with when they watch other people on screen.
And I'd love to know what your research found.
Is it authenticity that we're seeking?
I would say it's primarily the perception of authenticity, in which case how authentic
it actually is doesn't matter, really.
Oh, interesting.
I do have a study where we looked at YouTubers and parosocial attributes, like what they
were doing in their videos to sort of cultivate a parosocial relationship.
And so if we think about, for example, a YouTuber, a lot of those people start off, if we go
back to 2005, 2006 when YouTubers really just starting, those people are like in their
bedrooms with like a janky camera.
And it gives this idea like, okay, I'm just a regular person, you're just a regular person,
we're all just regular people together.
That industry has changed quite a bit.
YouTubers are professionals now.
And so authenticity is still that perception like, oh, this is just a regular person like
me.
Because if you're an influencer, your whole career is based on your ability to create parosocial
relationships.
Right.
Yeah.
But what we found is that it was a lot of self-disclosure and we were pretty broad with that.
So it didn't have to be like a deep dark secret.
It could be something very small.
And what we found there was it didn't really matter the type of self-disclosure.
So it could be positive things.
I had a good day.
I did some fun stuff with my friends.
It could be neutral things.
I woke up late today.
It could be negative things.
It didn't really matter.
It still builds those feelings of authenticity in that map, social relationships.
Generally speaking, if you've got a friend, you know some positive things, some negative
things, some neutral things about them.
I wonder too about the lines then between sort of the parosocial relationship of today
and the celebrity.
The celebrity is such an old idea.
And I think many viewers and many audiences felt some kind of ownership over celebrities.
At least their images, their PR realities, all that kind of stuff.
So what are some of the differences between the modern parosocial relationship and the
long-standing celebrity relationship?
So if we think about, we go back to the golden age of cinema.
If you look into it, it's really wild what the movie studios at the time, how much control
they had over stars, lives, and they would do things like arranged marriages.
So they had this crazy control so the images were very, very curated.
Now there's just so much more access.
And part of it, when you think about an influencer, they are inviting people into their lives
in a certain way.
And there is that feeling of this is authentic, this is real in a way that, you know, 1920s
Hollywood doesn't feel because it was so carefully constructed.
And I think that authenticity kind of builds these parosocial relationships in a way that
is interesting and unique.
This idea of celebrity, that is also a parosocial relationship, but it is a little bit different
because unlike our traditional understanding of influencers, celebrity is sort of on a
pedestal.
Like it's hard to imagine like, Beyonce shopping at public.
That would kind of break your brain a little bit.
It really would.
Yeah.
In a way that's not true with like influencers because of that sort of perception of authenticity,
a little bit more.
Oh, that totally makes sense.
It makes me wonder too if parosocial relationships and influencers as they are having more influence
over everything.
If that will change our ideas about celebrity too, I mean, maybe the celebrities of the
future, even the Beyonce level of celebrity in the future, you know, will be shopping at
public and will actually make a point of showing us that they shop at public, you know, to
perform authenticity in that way.
Well, I mean, I remember so when Leo Messi moved to play at Inner Miami, somebody like posted
a video of him at publics and everybody was like, oh my gosh, how cool is that publics?
You know, one of the most famous people in the world and they shop at publics.
I think people who actually really respond to stuff like that.
This is a real person.
He shops at public.
Yeah.
Social media has changed the amount of access we get with celebrities.
Megan, there's sort of this inversion happening in which maybe influencers who gained followers
by being quote unquote authentic and letting you into their lives are now curating their
lives more similarly to how the studios and actors have traditionally done and celebrities
who have historically been very curated and manicured are showing us parts of their lives
that are more authentic.
I, yes, definitely.
I think that's such a good point.
And I also wonder whether the inversion you're describing is also just a matter of like
technological logistics.
Just a function basically of the way we now interact with each other through screens.
This is something else that Marshall McCluen talked about.
You know, we may think about technology as gadgets that we build and use and most importantly
that we control.
But he said that tech also controls us.
Oh, yeah.
Like technology basically has an ideology baked into it in some way where, you know, each
new piece of technology, whether it's a newspaper or a radio or a TV or a smartphone has assumptions
basically baked into it about how the human should interact with it.
And when we interact with those devices over time, that kind of conditions us to live
according to those assumptions, according to the way that the technology guides us to
live.
So print mediums encourage us to think in ways that are basically, you know, printing, linear
or logical.
Right.
And screen mediums are much more visceral and immediate.
Yeah.
And, you know, what about AI?
Where's that going to fit into all of this?
Hmm.
You know, like right now there's just a lot of discussion around how AI is learning about
us through these large language models.
But how is it going to impact the way we think and how we look for connection?
Yes.
Yes.
Yes.
We're in this moment right now where it's actually becoming quite hard for people to discern
instantly if something is even AI or not.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So what do we call that relationship?
Hmm.
I asked Dr. Fashow about that.
I wanted to know, especially if the relationships that people are building with AI could still
be considered parasocial.
Or if, as the bots learn how to imitate human connection, we should think differently
about our relationships with AI.
It is parasocial in so much as that is one-sided, which is part of the definition of what parasocial
is.
Yeah.
But because the illusion of it being two-sided is so much deeper than like you're watching
somebody on TV, right?
Yeah.
Yeah.
So if we think about like a chatbot talking to you and you talking to it, it certainly
seems more social in one sense because you're talking and getting a response.
But generally speaking, they don't have memory in the same way that humans do, and they don't
build relationships the same way humans do as of right now.
I'm sure, you know, I'm not like an AI person who's designing and developing AI, and so
they might listen to this and be like, just you wait.
Yeah, that's right.
There's a bot that's remembering you right now.
Yeah.
Yeah, but you're going to train my bot right now.
Promise I'm not a bot.
AI definitely feels like another evolution of the technology and the tools that we've
seen.
And just like with those other tools and with those other technologies and that other
evolution, it's really a bit incumbent on us as people who are using those tools and technologies
to make sure that we're not forming any sort of, you know, bad relationship to it.
Like we've got to check ourselves just like, you know, anybody could have a potentially
bad relationship in a pair of social relationship where they take it too far with AI, we're going
to have to do the same thing.
Oh, I love that comparison.
You know, we learn in adulthood to build boundaries in those relationships to protect ourselves.
Often and to manage our vulnerabilities, yeah, and our intimacies and protect other people
too.
Right.
And maybe we are in the kind of preteen phase of figuring out the relationship that we
have with AI.
Hmm.
The preteen phase, the most fun phase to go through.
And maybe hardest to.
Interestingly, it's also the phase when we're shifting our relationships to be more personal
and nature.
Researchers have found that this is the time when you're sharing more intimate thoughts
with people outside of your families.
You know, you're letting more people into your inner life.
So actually, maybe describing this time with our devices as a sort of adolescence is
really appropriate.
Yeah.
And adolescence is also so like future oriented, right?
So much of that phase of life isn't just about the relationships you're forging in that
moment, but it's also about looking ahead and sort of figuring out who you want to be,
who you want to become.
And I think that's really useful here too to think about just as we sort of consider
what kind of digital adulthood we want to create together and especially what types of relationships
we want to be building with each other.
I actually think it's really important that we're not too quick to demonize this behavior.
What's really become clear to me in this conversation is that parasocial relationships,
they're actually fine and normal to have.
I mean, for some people, yes, there's going to be a small risk of these relationships
turning dysfunctional.
But largely, parasocial relationships, they fulfill some sort of need that we seem to
have in our lives.
Yes.
And a really profound need too, I think.
Yeah.
As we've been talking about, and I've been thinking too, we tend to talk about social
media and bots and the web in general as these things that are totally new and unprecedented
and therefore so hard to figure out.
But the machines are really just new tools for doing this very ancient thing, which like
you said, is connecting with each other.
Humans are social animals and we will find ways to be social, whether it's on a Zoom call
in person or I don't know, on a podcast.
No.
Well, it's been really nice connecting with you, Megan.
It's been nice connecting with you too, Andrea.
That's all for this episode of How to Know What's Real.
This episode was hosted by Andrea Valdas and me, Megan Garber.
Our producer is Natalie Brennan.
Our editors are Claudina Bade and Jocelyn Frank.
Fact check by Anna Alvarado.
Our engineer is Rob's Merciac.
Rob also composed some of the music for this show.
The executive producer of audio is Claudina Bade and the managing editor of audio is Andrea
Valdas.
Next time on How to Know What's Real.
When we go online, you know, there's joy in interacting with the people we know.
But there's also pleasure to, you know, what I think of as that, you know, the digital
street, right, the ability to just see other people living their lives in ways that you're
just like, wow, that's different and I'm intrigued.
What we can learn from urbanization about how to live in a crowded and bustling digital
world.
Talk with you on Monday.
