A one-sided relationship is a bad relationship, right? Not necessarily, says Elaine Auyoung. She’s interested in what are called parasocial relationships, where we know and care a lot about someone but they don’t directly engage with us – like a celebrity, for example, or even a fictional character. While parasocial relationships are often thought of as inferior to regular person-to-person relationships, Elaine argues that they have a unique value. Precisely because there’s no reciprocation, parasocial relationships can allow us to engage with other people’s experiences without the obstacles of social anxiety or self-centredness.
Tag: rereading
For many people, binge-watching is a guilty pleasure. In the Golden Age of Television, we might feel guilty because great tv shows deserve to be watched slowly and thoughtfully, not rushed through. If we’re just watching for what happens next in the story, we’ll probably miss out on subtler kinds of artistry. But Michaela Bronstein wants to defend bingeing, and points out that people had similar worries a hundred years ago about the novel: concerns about binge-reading then and binge-watching today reflect a shift from viewing each medium as just entertainment to viewing it as high art.
What do we want when we revisit a beloved story? Sarah Chihaya suggests we’re drawn back by contradictory desires: on the one hand we want to relive what we experienced the first time, but we also want something fresh and new. From recent movie sequels and remakes to the experimental novel Life After Life, Sarah shows how revisiting familiar stories can be a cynical ploy to make money, but can also be an under-appreciated source of artistic inspiration.