I’ve been watching a lot of Youtube lately. Before quarantine, most of the media I consumed was online videos, but that sort of got hyper-charged the last couple of months between the depression and the sitting around inside all day. Occasionally Youtube content creators will talk about the keys to success on the platform, and generally it comes down to the creation of content that forms a parasocial relationship from the audience to the creator. Shannon Strucci made an excellent documentary on this.
You succeed by making the people watching your video think that you are their friend. Not in a specific, personal way, but by cultivating a feeling of intimacy. By sharing your personal feelings, your life story, and acting in a friendly and personable way. It isn’t real of course. Youtubers aren’t your friends, and you don’t actually know someone because you watch their videos. However, it feels real. More than that, it feels more real than real. You get all the intimate details of someone, all their personal feelings and deepest thoughts, without any fluff interactions in between. There isn’t building to this point like in a normal friendship, it’s cutting right to the point.
The reason I bring this up is because it is understandable why someone would want to have a parasocial relationship with a content creator as opposed to actual real life friendships. It’s all the fun parts of a friendship with none of the boring or messy parts in between. It is a simulation of a friendship, if one would want to use the terminology of Baudrillard.
If one so desired, it’s possible to look at all of media through that lens. As just a less complicated and easier to digest version of the real world. However, I find it really interesting that, even with the knowledge that real life content like youtube or reality tv is staged, there is a very precise distinction drawn between the real and the not real. That behind the scenes context that a TV show is real vs off the cuff, it makes a lot of difference. This makes me think of Videodrome.
The scene that sticks out in my mind is when the protagonist Max is talking to Masha, and he learns that the footage is real and not faked. He says that it would have been easier to fake it. That knowledge changes how he thought about videodrome. It’s not about the images themselves, it’s about what they represent. That extra level of emotional investment knowing that it’s real people really being tortured. Nothing has actually changed in the content, it’s all about how Max has been perceiving it.
This is a bit different in video games as opposed to films. The former is consumed actively, the other passively. This often makes people think that because people enjoy killing in games that they enjoy killing in real life. That the game in Avalon trained these people to be murderers. It placed them in a situation where they would kill people-like entities, and then the jump over to actual people is inevitable.
This is complicated by the fact that computer controlled opponents aren’t designed to simulate the behavior of actual people. If they did, they wouldn’t be any fun to fight against. Most combat-centric games are more similar to a pop up shooting gallery, it wouldn’t be any fun if the targets behaved in the random ways people are. It’s better to fake it than to make it real.
I’ve concluded with two contradictory ideas. You want the genuine in one case, and fake in another. Or maybe in the end you know its fake and real at the same time, sort of a doublethink thing going on. I couldn’t say for sure one way or the other.
Aidan Tamke Cyberpunk Class 