When Real Relationships Start to Look Parasocial
Briefly

When Real Relationships Start to Look Parasocial
"All of my relationships live, at least in part, in my phone, where they are forced to share space with everything else that happens there. Lately, the feeling creeping up on me is that the pieces of my relationships that exist on that screen seem less and less distinguishable from all the other content I consume there. A lot happens inside my phone."
"it could be bringing me updates from people I love, or showing me alerts I never asked for from corporations hungry for my attention. When I pull it out, content and communication appear in similar forms-notifications, social-media posts, vertical video-and they blur together. As interactions with loved ones converge with all the other kinds of media on smartphones, Samuel Hardman Taylor, a professor who studies social media at the University of Illinois at Chicago, told me, "our relationships are becoming a part of that consumption behavior.""
All relationships increasingly exist on smartphones, sharing space with commerce, entertainment, work, and services. The device delivers notifications that can be personal updates or corporate alerts, and those signals take similar forms. Social interactions on phones appear alongside videos, games, news, and apps, making them harder to distinguish from other consumed content. As social media absorbs time once spent on TV and other media, relationships adopt a consumption model and can feel optional. The entertainment-oriented design of phones reduces the salience of loved ones and increases the effort required to identify and prioritize meaningful interactions.
Read at The Atlantic
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