Parasocial relationships and Twitter

Posted: March 9th, 2009 | Tags: , , , | Comments

While I was watching Helene Auramo’s interview about Twitter in YLE news earlier today, Helene mentioned something that caught my ear. She was talking about celebrities who are tweeting and this way their fans can feel closer to their idols.

This reminded me about uses and gratifications research, which studies why do people use media and what do they use them for. While uses and gratifications research is an influential tradition in mass media research, it might be fun to study social media through its theoretical perspective.

Uses and gratifications approach emphasizes motives and the self-perceived needs of audience members and there is not only one way that people uses media. Denis McQuail (1983) has classified four common reasons for media use:

  • Entertainment – People are using media for relaxing, escaping from problems and emotional release.
  • Integration and Social Interaction – Media can help maintaining social roles, enabling one to connect with family, friends and society and having a substitute for real-life companionship. Also media consumption helps finding a basis for conversation and social interaction.
  • Personal Identity – With media people can reinforce their personal values, find models of behavior and identify with valued others (in the media). Media can also help to gain insight into oneself.
  • Information – Using media to find information might be the most obvious use case for media.

One of the most interesting aspects of McQuail’s classifications is the notion that people are using media for having a substitute for real-life companionship. In TV-series and films people have usually their favorite characters and actors. Parasocial relationship or parasocial interaction is a term to describe these one-sided, parasocial interpersonal relationships in which one party knows a great deal about the other, but the other does not (Horton & Wohl, 1956). The most common form of such relationships are one-sided relations between celebrities and audience or fans.

The theory of parasocial relationships becomes quite interesting while examining Twitter with it. In Twitter you can find bunch of big celebrities with thousands or even hundreds of thousands of followers. If you have used Twitter, you know that there is no way to interact constantly with all of your followers when you have reached certain limit. This is why at some point Twitter transforms from personal medium to mass medium for some popular tweeters. But this doesn’t prevent celebrities to reply to the tweet of their followers. Twitter has a possibility for interaction which is missing from traditional mass media. This kind of possibility and activity might make parasocial relationships even stronger. One reply from the star doesn’t build real relationship.

Studies also show that the linked structures of social networks do not reveal actual interactions among people. Scarcity of attention and the daily rhythms of life makes people default to interacting with those few that matter and that reciprocate their attention (Huberman, Romero & Wu, 2009). Even if people are following or their have plenty of followers or friends, they are only interacting with few other users. It seems that there are plenty of parasocial relationships in Twitter.

If I study my own behaviors in Twitter and my common reasons for the usage, McQuail’s four categories make sense, even if they were results of mass media research. My main drivers to use Twitter is to connect with friends and to find interesting information. The results seems to be even too self-evidence and this has been one of the main critiques against uses and gratifications research.

Horton, Donald; R. Richard Wohl (1956). “Mass communication and para-social interaction: Observations on intimacy at a distance”. Psychiatry 19 (3): 215–229. republished.
McQuail, D. (1983). Mass Communication Theory (1st ed.). London: Sage.
Huberman, A. Romero, D. M. & Wu, F. (2009) Social networks that matter: Twitter under the microscope. First Monday, Volume 14, Number 1 – 5 January 2009

  • Aku
    Someone should really do some uses and gratifications research on social media!

    Also the notion of parasocial relationships is quite intereresting. Interestingly people can use the same medium (Twitter) in completely different ways (their motives being differen too, I suppose). That is not the case with traditional mass media.
  • I tried to dig up some research done on this field, but it seems there hasn't been much activity. On late 90s there has been some uses and gratifications research done for webpages, but web has come a long way after that.
  • thanks for getting into the physoclogical reasons people use Twitter, and for the sources on the bottom so i can look up some more information about these new terms i learned today.
  • Happy to hear that you found it interesting. It is also quite interesting to see how people are using social media services. like Twitter, for totally different purposes. The new use cases are usually also a surprise for the developers.
  • that's always the case with any technology, the unintended uses.

    you think the guy who invented SMS expected people in Africa to setup bank accounts with it?

    you think the guy who invented the combustion engine expected it to power airplanes?

    the most interesting twitter usage, to this day, for me personally at least, was that woman who wore a device while she was pregnant so that every time the baby inside her kicked, he tweeted.
  • DaGood
    Great stuff. Definitely Twitter is being used by many celebrities as a push medium with little real interactivity.

    I think it is somewhat the same in mass media: The most successful show of recent times has been American Idol. It is part passive experience and part user-engagement voting thing.
  • I like your analogue with Idols and other similar reality show where people can have limited interaction, like SMS-voting.
  • good read, and will definitely spy on those studies you posted =)
  • The NY Times writes about "ghost Twittering".
  • This is rich, JP --- the academic made real and applicable. As in our tweet exchange today, dunderhead poseurs at Forrester need to stop listening to themselves long enough to check back into the constantly evolving fabric of media with all of its meanings, applications, nuance & expressions.
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