Sunday, April 5, 2009

Para-Social Researrching

Parasocial relations are the illusion of "face-to-face relationship between spectator and performer" in new media, as first described by Horton & Wohl in 1956.
Lonesome Girl is used as an example of extreme para-social relations, a 1951 radio show that was widely popular.
"She was literally an unseen presence, and each of her listeners could, in his mind’s eye, picture her as his fancy dictated. She could, by an act of the imagination, be almost any age or any size, have any background." (Horton & Whol 1956)
Lonely Girl 15 reminds us of Lonesome Girl -
"they represent the extreme development of the para-social, appealing to the most isolated, and illustrate, in an exaggerated way, the principles we believe to apply through the whole range of “personality” programs. The programs which fall in this extreme category promise not only escape from an unsatisfactory and drab reality, but try to prop up the sagging self-esteem of their unhappy audience by the most blatant reassurances. Evidently on the presumption that the maximum of loneliness is the lack of a sexual partner, these programs tend to be addressed to one sex or the other, and to endow the persona with an erotic suggestiveness"

This persona may be goddess fama
And according to Ovid in his Metamorphoses, Fama lives at the center of the world, where earth, sea, and sky meet; from there She can see and hear everything that goes on in the world. Her home on a tall peak has no doors but instead has a thousand windows and is made entirely of bronze, so that the slightest noise or whisper echoes and reverberates throughout.

Donald Horton and Richard Wohl, 'Mass Communication and Parasocial Interaction: Observations on Intimacy at a Distance', Psychiatry 19: 215-29, 1956

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