Parasocial Climbing

Introduction

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Lexicon Valley Podcast

0:30From Booksmart Studios, this is Lexicon Valley, a podcast about language. I'm Bob Garfield with Mike Volo. And today we'll talk about a common prefix that is attached to dozens of words. And we'll discuss in depth one of those examples in particular. Hey, Mikey. Hey, Bobby. How you doing? Splendid. Thank you. And your own self? I'm great. I'm great. You know, I've noticed that when you intro the show,

1:00you do it in a way that is paradoxically both accurate and mysterious at the same time. It's a pattern. It's a paradigm if you want to get fancy about it. And yeah, I cop to that. I don't think we should just parachute in and start blasting. We should have a framing paragraph to focus attention. Whether you're training a parakeet or wooing a paramour, the combination of repetition and intrigue is what?

1:31Is paramount. Okay. Okay. I think you've made your point. We've got it.

Prefix Para

1:37The prefix is obviously para, P-A-R-A, but it's not clear whether all of those paras are the same para. Thank you for noticing. Sure. And I thought I was being so subtle. But yes, it's a subject raised by our producer, Liv Ingram, who has been seeing a lot written about parasocial relationships, which is the one-sided affection for media persona, usually, by their fans. But she's also spending time in her third-grader's classroom where the teacher's aides are still

2:11paid peanuts, only now they are dignified with the job title paraeducators, or just paras for short. Then she thought about paraplegic and paramecium and wondered what one para had to do with the others. And so I think it's a very good question. It is. It is. Because as you said earlier, there are many English words beginning with that prefix para, and at first glance, the common denominator, it's not obvious.

2:41But it exists. Well, yeah, it exists, though it may be more accurate to say they exist. For most para words, what the para means depends on whether it ultimately comes from the Latin or the Greek. Let's start with the Greek. Where para means alongside of or next to, in location. It could also mean that metaphorically, by the way, not the thing itself, but close, something like the thing.

3:15Like a paralegal works adjacent to a lawyer, who I guess is just called a legal. Right. So whether you're using para literally or figuratively, there's some kind of proximate relationship going on. That's the essence of the Greek para. You used the word paragraph earlier. In ancient Greece, a playwright might put a little mark in the margin of his or her play to indicate that there's a new speaker or maybe a new section.

3:45That mark was next to para, the block of writing, the graph. If this podcast were an ancient Greek text, we might put one of those paragraph marks right here, because I'm going to now stop talking about paragraph and talk about paradigm, which you also mentioned earlier. Paradigm can be broken down into its Greek roots to mean exhibit or show side by side. You can imagine how that would come to mean a pattern or a framework, which is what paradigm essentially is.

4:21Notice, though, that in both paragraph and paradigm, the para, the alongside-ness, is literal, right? One thing is next to another. You also mentioned para-educator. In that case, the para, like paralegal, it's a bit more figurative. The person is not officially a teacher, but they're underneath the teacher. They're in the vicinity of teacher-liness. Okay. Yeah. Yeah, that scans.

4:52By the way, para-professional educator, or para for short, you suggested those terms were new. They've actually been around since at least the 1960s and 70s. My sense is that they're new-ish in certain areas. Yeah, I do think it was more common to call a teacher's aide a teacher's aide back in the day, and now para-educator is getting more and more traction. Can't prove it, though. Just feel it.

Latin Para

5:20Okay. Then there are these other para-words that get their para not from Greek, but from the Latin verb parare, which means to prepare. That's the para that you see in a word like parasol, which means preparation or protection against the sun. A parapet, you know, a parapet, you know, that teeth-like formation at the top of a wall, that's a protection against the chest. The pet part comes from pectus, your pecs, your chest.

5:52Hmm. It's a protection against the chest getting hit by, I don't know, a cannonball or... Probably arrows, that would be my guess. Yeah. Whatever medieval weapon people were hurling over the parapet of your castle. Yeah, I think if the cannonball hits the tooth that you're adjacent to, you're dead. I don't think you're munitions proof up there. No, I think it was probably more effective against, like you suggested, arrows. A parachute is protection against falling.

6:24The chute part means to fall. But then there are some words that look like para-words, but they're not. They're par-words, or P-E-R as we would say in English, per, which means by, B-Y, like in par excellence. That's that French expression that means literally by excellence. One of these words is paramour. It's not paramour, it's paramour, which means by love.

6:57Paramount, paramount is another one of these, by amount. Then there's the occasional para-word that's mysterious. Nobody's actually sure where parakeet comes from, but it's none of the above. It's not the Greek para, it's not the Latin para, it's not the Latin par, per. However, what's interesting, though, is that French, Italian, and Spanish all have essentially the same word for that bird. It's just pronounced differently, right? So it's parroquet, parroqueto, and periquito.

7:31It's not clear why or how these versions are related to each other. The thinking is that the para was, centuries ago, a man's name, like Pierre or Peter or Perico. And the eat part is a diminutive, like the et in cigarette or kitchenette. In German, by the way, it's schluchengangenmorphenstuppen. Et, right, with the et at the end. Et, yes. So a parakeet is, you know, a little Pedro, perhaps.

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Parasocial Relationships

9:17But the para word that we want to talk in depth about, the one that Liv has noticed more and more lately, is parasocial. That para is the Greek one. Parasocial is not social per se, not social exactly. It's somewhere in throwing distance of social, right? Like loitering in the vicinity of social. It's a very zeitgeist word these days, obviously, because with the explosion of social media, our channel to the lives of celebrities is through the very same channel that we used to, you know, hear from our friends and family.

9:58It seems so personal that I guess it's easy to trick yourself into thinking that it's an actual relationship based on knowing one another. So parasocial is one of those words that we can date precisely. We know exactly when and by whom it was coined. In 1956, by the sociologists Donald Horton and Richard Wall in the journal Psychiatry, their article was about certain effects of mass media, which was really just starting to be studied at that time.

10:35This is obviously pre-internet and social media and influencers like you were talking about. They started off by saying, quote, one of the striking characteristics of the new mass media, radio, television and the movies, is that they give the illusion of face-to-face relationship with the performer. They go on to point out that characters in these various media often come to life, quote, in an especially vivid and arresting way.

11:07We propose to call this seeming face-to-face relationship between spectator and performer, a parasocial relationship. Now, it's not like they were singling out certain people who had especially fallen victim to this, you know, like Doug from Pittsburgh. He's in a parasocial relationship with Lucille Ball or Ed Sullivan. Everybody listening or watching at home was part of this, what they called, quote, simulacrum of conversational give and take.

11:40And then I guess the next level of that would be people who read fan magazines or write fan letters or even more join a fan club so that they can focus their attention on their, you know, fave. Actually, I've known a number of people who were, you know, in the fan world long before Comic-Con and things like that, who came to believe that a celebrity who sent them an autograph was a friend at one level or another.

12:13Yeah, you know, I have some memories of joining a Star Wars fan club when I was eight or nine, and I believe I got an autographed photo of Anthony Daniels, who was the actor who played C-3PO, or at least he was in that suit. I remember feeling this little jolt of excitement when that package came in the mail. You don't have a hidden room with hundreds of photos of Anthony Daniels and news clippings pinned to a wall, do you?

12:47No, no, I was just a casual fan. But when those two sociologists coined this word parasocial, it was more or less neutral and descriptive, I would say. Yeah. To be a spectator of modern radio and TV in the 1950s was, by definition, to be in a parasocial relationship. And it was way ahead of its time, as I think our conversation is already suggesting. You know, it took many years for the word to gain traction.

13:17And in fact, if you do a newspaper search for parasocial, you find just a handful mentions from the 1960s, another handful from the 70s, maybe two handfuls from the 80s. I'll give you a few of my favorites, skipping across the various decades. Mel Heimer wrote a syndicated column called My New York that ran in 130, 150 newspapers around the country. In 1968, he wrote about the former middleweight boxing champion, Rocky Graziano.

13:53And he tells the anecdote that when a psychologist told Rocky that he had a, quote, remarkable parasocial interaction with his television audience, Rocky's reply was unprintable. So you just know that Rocky said something like, what the fuck are you talking about? And to be fair to Rocky, anyone would have had that reaction, right? Because who the hell would know what parasocial was in the 1960s? Right. So there's one from 1979.

14:24The San Francisco Chronicle had a piece about how some television viewers were in the habit of talking back to network anchors, actually saying goodnight to them in some cases. One viewer, who was only 18 months old and therefore too young to really speak to the anchors, nevertheless developed, the piece said, a parasocial relationship with Morley Safer from 60 Minutes. Quote, returning to the TV room one evening, the mother found her baby avidly trying to feed his bottle to the reporter.

15:00When Safer failed to share a slurp, the toddler became frustrated. I sat across from Morley Safer on my very first day of college. His daughter was in my class. I will just say that I did not attempt to feed him. Well, you're to be congratulated. You displayed a remarkable amount of self-control. So in 1989, a clinical psychologist from Seattle, Dr. Charles Schwartzbeck, he wrote a syndicated column about how television for a lot of kids

15:33was replacing actual friends. He wrote, many people turn to the television regardless of the content of the programs after a day of being disappointed and hurt by real people. The parasocial interaction with the television does not, however, replace true interpersonal relationships. The thing is, by 1989, publicity departments and programming consultants had for decades been encouraging news executives to cultivate the notion of the news anchor as your trusted friend and neighbor.

16:10These manufactured personal connections were a media strategy. Yeah, and so the point is that sometime in the 1980s, parasocial was starting to be taken more seriously as a problem for individual people, even if the word itself hadn't yet broken through to the general population. On August 4th, 1995, a broadcast and print reporter from Canada, Antonia Zerbisius, wrote in the Toronto Star about something that had happened to her some years prior.

16:47She was in Montreal getting ready for an on-air news report when somebody grabbed her by the shoulder and said, Antonia, quote, I turned, expecting a friend. Instead, I faced a stranger. Hi, he smiled. Hi, I smiled back. Do I know you? No, but I know you. I watch you every night in my bedroom. Now, that's creepy, right? Yeah. How very Travis Bickle of him.

17:18Yeah. She goes on to say, Viewers feel that they know you. Some conjure up relationships in their minds, imagining that you're a friend or a lover. This phenomenon has a name, parasocial interaction. And the better you are at generating it, the better your ratings. The reason Zerbisius was recalling this incident was that a few days before, on August 1st, 1995, a sportscaster named Brian Smith was shot and killed in the parking lot of his station

17:49by a man who had been hounding media figures in Ottawa for years, My point is that parasocial was taking on, even more so than in the 1980s, sinister and more pathological connotations. But again, the word still hadn't broken through. If you had asked me in 1995, what does the word parasocial mean? I might have said, I don't know, is it when a group of people jump out of a plane

18:20and have tea on the way down? As far as I could tell, the first time parasocial was used in the New York Times was 1993 in a piece by William Grimes about the David Letterman show. It's in quotes and it was defined. It doesn't show up again in the Times until 2008 in a piece by Clive Thompson about Facebook and this new thing called Twitter. And again, it's in quotes and it's defined. By 2019, when it's used in a piece by Kevin Roos

18:54about the hugely popular YouTuber who goes by the name PewDiePie, it's not in quotes, it's not defined, it's just there like any other commonly known word, right? By a lot of hardcore YouTube users, he says, quote, never watch TV and develop elaborate parasocial bonds with their favorite creators. He doesn't stop to tell us what that means because he assumes we do at this point. And I don't know, maybe I did know what parasocial meant in 2019.

19:26It's hard for me to get a grip on that word exactly. But for him in that article, it would be as if he defined the word cognitive, which he uses in the next paragraph, right? The reader knows what that means. I don't need to define it. This surprises me because you would have thought that especially when John Hinckley shot President Ronald Reagan, he told the police that he was doing it to impress Jodie Foster, the actress.

19:57Right, yeah. Who, I guess, hitherto had not responded to his entreaties. And the spate of high-profile celebrity stalker cases that seemed to follow in clusters throughout the 90s that the word would have been just a go-to to describe what's going on in the head of a stalker, I think I must have a phantom memory because it seemed to me that it was like a common parlance by the time they were arresting someone

20:28for breaking into Madonna's apartment Yeah, you know, I think actually it is a phantom memory, Bob. I would be shocked if the word parasocial were used in any newspaper account in connection with Hinckley and the shooting. If it were, my sense is that it would be a one-off, more or less, and it would certainly be defined. I would suggest that parasocial has been lingering there in the vocabulary kind of on the edges for decades

21:00waiting for the moment when we really wanted that word, right? When we needed it. And that moment seems to have arrived, especially with the advent of AI chatbots and the relationships that people are forming for better or for worse with robots, essentially. In fact, way back 70 years ago in that 1956 paper in which the word was coined, Horton and Wall say something that I think is remarkably prescient

21:31given where we are now, which arguably is on the cusp of what feels like, depending on what you think of AI, a dystopian future. Yeah, or a dystopian present because already there are teenagers and adults who are acting rashly when their parasocial relationships with chatbots go south. You've been jilted by a piece of software and you end your life.

22:03That's happening now. So when more and more of our lives are mediated by algorithms, it suggests to me a future that is orders of magnitude more dystopian than we can even at this point imagine. Yeah, and you know, and I said Horton and Wall were prescient. They suggest in their piece from 1956 that for some people, at least, the function of a parasocial relationship

22:33is compensatory in as much as it provides, and this is a direct quote, in as much as it provides the socially and psychologically isolated with a chance to enjoy the elixir of sociability. Yeah, I mean, he does put a bit of a utopian gloss on the role that AI can play in giving an incel someone to woo, but I'm just struck by his formulation because I myself have long had an elixir of sociability.

23:04It works really well. It's called booze and it ain't failed me yet. Well, for those of us like myself who are teetotalers, we just have to muddle through with awkward small talk about the weather and baseball. I guess, and in that sense, I'm sorry, I can't come to your barbecue next week because I'm going to probably have something else to do. And if I don't, I will find something. Lexicon Valley is produced by Livia Bloom Ingram who, when pressed,

23:34swears that her interest in the word parasocial is purely academic. It sounds kind of sus to me, Mike. I'd bet my bottom dollar that she has been crushing hard on Tilda Swinton and just absolutely been a deluge of emails, texts, and other displays of admiration. I mean, I don't have any data on this, but... Oh, I think you are dead on. I think there may even be

24:05a restraining order involved. So, yeah, me too. All right. If you want to leave a comment about Tilda or anything else you've heard on this episode or any episode or to become a premium member, go to booksmartstudios.com. Premium membership will get you access to our many bonus episodes and it'll get you everything ad-free. All right, Mikey, we done here?

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