Parasocial relationships are one-sided relationships, where one person extends emotional energy, interest and time, and the other party, the persona, is completely unaware of the other’s existence. Parasocial relationships are most common with celebrities, organizations (such as sports teams) or television stars.
Parasocial relationships expand the social network in a way that negates the chance of rejection and empowers individuals to model and identify with individuals of their choosing who naturally elicit an empathic response. For some, the one sided nature of the relationship is a relief from strained complementary relationships in their real life. Parasocial relationships are cultivated by the media to resemble face-to-face relationships. Over time, so many experiences are shared with John Daily or Justin Beiber or Jay-Z that we develop an intimacy and friendship with the ‘media user’ and feel that they know and understand us.
In the past, parasocial relationships occurred predominantly with television personas. Now, these relationships also occur between individuals and their favorite bloggers, social media users, and gamers. The nature and intimacy of parasocial relationships has also matured. Reality television allows viewers to share the most intimate and personal lives of television personas, and celebrities openly share their opinions and activities through various social media outlets such as twitter and Facebook.
Additionally, the Internet allows for 24-hour access to media users, and increased internet dependency may lead to increased parasocial interactions. While parasocial relationships still remain one-sided, they have transformed into more interactive environments, allowing individuals to communicate with their media personas, and increasing the intimacy and strength of the parasocial relationship.
Despite the one-sided nature of parasocial relationships, there are numerous similarities between these relationships and more traditional social relationships. Studies show parasocial relationships are voluntary, provide companionship, and are influenced by social attraction. Furthermore, viewers experience a connection with the media user and express feelings of affection, gratitude, longing, encouragement, and loyalty towards them.
Just as relational maintenance is important in sustaining a relationship with our real life friends and family, relational maintenance also occurs in parasocial relationships through events such as weekly viewings of Keeping Up with the Kardashians. Blogs and social media sites, such as Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram, increase the ease with which viewers can express their feelings. Parasocial relationships are popular within these online communities, and this may be due to the increased sense of “knowing” the personas, or the perception of parasocial interactions as having a high reward and no chance of rejection.
Historically, parasocial relationships were viewed as pathological and a symptom of loneliness, isolation and social anxieties. However, one study found there was no correlation between loneliness and the intensity of viewers’ parasocial relationship with onscreen characters. Other research has decreased the stigma of such relationships and led clinicians to believe that such relationships can broaden one’s social network rather than restrict it.
Parasocial relationships are important to viewers, and in many ways advantageous because of the support that the viewer gains from the relationship. Many seriously ill people find afternoons with Oprah or Ellen the one chance in the day to see a friend without stress and gain strength from their relationship with the hostess.
Individuals with parasocial relationships often express appreciation towards their favorite personas for helping them to get through tough times. Additionally, some viewers perceive the personas as helping to significantly shape their own identity. The support that parasocial relationships provide is of substantial value to the viewers that engage in them, and with new social media techniques, these relationships are a viable way to expand individuals’ social networks.
Excerpts from video on Emotional Capitalism above (asides deleted)...Today talk of feelings and emotion has grown inflationary. Many academic disciplines are researching emotion. All of a sudden, the human being no longer counts as an "animal rationale", instead man is a creature of sentiment. That said, hardly anyone bothers to ask where this sudden interest in emotions came from.
Scientific emotion researchers are clearly not reflecting much on their own activities. Thus, they have failed to remark that the emotional boom stems from economic process above all. Worse still, utter conceptual confusion prevails. Emotion, feeling, and affect seem interchangeable for many researchers. Yet feeling and emotion are not identical. We speak, for in instance, of a feeling for language, athletics, or other people (spruch Gul Bal Gul MIT Gul respectively, linguistic aptitude, and act for sports and compassion. One may have a feel for language, or a feel for others, but no one has an emotion for language.
Our experiences calm emotion, calm-emotion. There's no such thing as a language affect, or a calm affect either. Mourning is a feeling too, but it sounds strange to speak of an affect of mourning, or of an emotion of mourning. Affect and emotion refer strictly to subjective matters, whereas feelings refers to something objective.
Feelings can be recounted. It has narrative length or breadth. Neither affect nor emotion admits an account. The crisis of feeling can be observed in contemporary Theater which also represents a crisis of giving account. Today the narrative fear of feeling is yielding to the clamorous fear of Affects. Because narrative is lacking, an affective Mass gets pulled onto stage. But in contrast to feeling, affect does not open up space. Instead, it steers a linear path in order to discharge, to unload itself.
The digital medium is an affect medium too, digital communications fosters immediate release of affect, catharsis, affect for. Simply on the basis of temporality, digital Communications convey an affect more than it transmits feeling. Shit storms are streams of affect. They represent exemplary phenomena of digital communication.
Feelings are constantive. For example, we say, "I have a feeling that". In contrast, it is impossible say, "I have an affect or an emotion that". Emotions are not constantive, but performative. In that sense, they refer to actions and deeds. In that sense, they're behavioural. Furthermore they are intentional and goal oriented. Feelings, on the other hand, do not necessarily display an intentional structure. Often the feeling of anxiety has no concrete object. What is it that makes anxiety different from Fear which has an intentional structure. Nor is it a feeling that is a sense for language intentional. Its non-intentional is what primarily distinguishes it from linguistic expression which is because it expresses is emotive. A feeling of cosmic Oneness and oceanic sense of the world and Cosmic and misdeful de oceanusful. That it does not focus on anything or anyone in particular is also possible. Neither emotions nor affects achieve the dimensions that characterize feelings. Emotions and affects are expressions of subjectivity.
Feelings also have a different temporality than emotions, they admit duration. Emotions prove significant more fleeting and shortlived than feelings. Likewise, an affect is often limited to a single moment. In contrast to feelings, emotions do not represent a state. The emotion does not stand. There is no emotion of rest. A feeling of calm is easy to conceive. An emotional calm. In contrast the expression emotional state has a paradoxical ring. Emotions are dynamic, situative, and performative. Emotional capitalism exploits precisely these qualities. Feelings, in contrast, cannot be truly exploited as so much as they have no performativity. Finally affects are not performative so much as eruptive. They lack performative directionality.
Atmosphere, our mood, sturm und drag, differs from both feeling and emotion. It possesses even more objectivity than feeling. Objectively, a space or room can harbor any given atmosphere. An atmosphere or mood, expresses a way it is. In contrast, emotions derive from deviations from the way it is. For instance, a place may diffuse a friendly mood. This atmosphere is something wholly objective. There is no such thing as a friendly emotion, or a friendly affect. Atmosphere, mood, is neither intentional nor performative. It is this element where one happens to find oneself it was it Von man seek. Defended, it represents a state of being or a state of mind, Beed kite. As such the atmosphere is static and constellative, whereas emotion is dynamic and performative. "Where" distinguishes a state, a disposition, in contrast to whether a direction defines emotion. Feeling in turn as a matter of therefore, "why".
Eva Illouz's.. "Cold Intimacy: In the making of emotional capitalism" offers no answers to the question of why it is that feeling experiences a boon under conditions of capitalism in particular. What is more, the book equates a feeling and emotions without drawing any conceptual distinctions at all. Nor is it very useful to locate the question of feelings under capitalism at its inaugural stages.
Weber's "Protestant work ethic" contains a core thesis about the role of emotions and economic actions for which anxiety is provoked by "inscrutable Divinity," which is at the heart of the capitalist entrepreneur's frantic activity, "Eva Illouz's so-called intimacies". It is mistaken to understand anxiety in terms of emotion. Anxiety is a feeling. It corresponds temporality proves incompatible with affect. Affect is not a constant state. As such, it lacks constancy that defines feeling. It is a constant feeling of anxiety that would entail a frantic entrepreneurial activity, but what Weber analyses is an aesthetic capitalism of accumulation which obeys rational logic more than it follows emotional logic.
Accordingly, capitalism of this sort does not feed into the consumer capitalism which derives its profits from emotions. Moreover emotional capitalism operates through selling and consumption of means and emotions. It is not use value, but a motive or cultic value that plays a constitutive role in the economy of consumption. By the same token, Eva Illouz fails to account for the fact the emotions come to possess value for capitalism only when a switch to an immaterial production occurs. Emotions have become the means of production only in our own times. Although also contends the core of the Doyan sociology, solidarity represents a bundle of emotions binding social actors to a central symbols of society they inhabit.
Summing up her argument she declares "unknown to them, canonical sociological accounts of modernity contain if not a full-fledged theory of emotions, at least numerous references to them. Anxiety, love, competitiveness, indifference, those are all present and moreover historical and sociological accounts of the ruptures which have led to the modern era." All these references to the various sociological theories of emotion do nothing to explain all the boom of emotion today. This corresponds to Eva Illouz's neglect of the conceptual distinctions between feeling, emotion, and affect. After all, the indifference and guilt are neither affects nor emotions. They are only meaningful to speak of the feelings of guilt. Eva Illouz's has failed to notice that the boom of emotions in our time ultimately derives from Neoliberalism. The neoliberal regime deploys emotions as resources in order to bring about heightened productivity and achievements.
Starting at a certain level of production, rationality, which is a medium of disciplinary Society, has its limits. Henceforth, it is experienced as a constant and inhibition. Suddenly it seems rigid and inflexible. At this point, emotionality takes place, which is the attending feeling of Liberty, the free flowing of Personality. After all, being free means giving free reign to emotions.
Emotional capitalism banks on freedom. It hails emotion as the exposition of unbridled subjectivity. Neoliberal technologies of power exploit the same subjectivity mercilessly. Rationality is defined by objectivity, generality, and steadiness. As such, it stands opposite emotionality, which is subjective and situation and volatile. Emotions arrive above all when the circumstances change and perception shifts. Rationality entails duration, consistency, and regularity. It prefers stable conditions. The neoliberal economy, increasingly dismantled by the continuity and progressively integrating instability in order to enhance productivity, is pushing the emotionalization of the productive process forward. Accelerated communication also promotes its emotionalization. Rationality is slower than emotionality. It has no speed, as it were. The process of acceleration now is leading to a dictatorship of emotion.
Consumer capitalism list emotions in order to generate more desires and needs. Emotional design models most emotions and shapes emotional patterns for the sake of maximizing consumption. All in all, today we do not consume "things" so much as "emotions". The former cannot be consumed without end, but the latter can. Emotions assume dimensions beyond the scope of the individual's use value. In doing so, they open up a field of consumption that is new, and knows no limits. In disciplinary Society, where one's task is to function, emotion represents disturbances. Accordingly, every effort is made to weed them out. Disciplinary societies concerned in part by orthopaedy, seek to make a shapeless mass of dough into an unfeeling machine. Machines function best when all emotions and feelings have been switched off.
The boom in emotions today stems not least of all, from a new immaterial mode of production in which communication interacts. Interaction plays an even greater world. It calls not just for cognitive competence, but also for emotional competence. In this context an integral person is installed in the process of production. Daimler Chrysler has publicly declared that since employees behavior and their social and emotional skills play an increasing role in the evaluation of the work, this will be assessed on the basis of objectives achieved and the quality of outcomes. Now sociality, communication, and even individual conduct are being exploited. People provide raw material with the optimization of the corporate communication. As Hewlett Packard puts it, "HP is a firm where one can breathe a spirit of communication, a spirit of interrelated relations, where people can communicate, where you go towards others in an effective relationship."
A paradigm shift is taking place in the administrative level of companies. Emotions being granted more and more significance. Rational management techniques are being replaced by emotional management. Managers today are safely leaving the principle of rational action behind. Increasingly they resemble motivation coaches. Motivation connects with emotions. Positive emotions provide deferment. And while by this deferment, makes motivation grow. Emotions are performative in so far that they call forth certain actions. As inclinations, they represent the energetic, the sensory, even the sensuous basis for activity.
Emotions are steered by the limbic system, which is also where drives are seized. They form pre-reflective half-conscious psycho instinctual level of action and stateful awareness. Neoliberal psycho-politics seize the emotion in order to influence the actions on the pre reflective level. By way of emotion, it manages to cut and operate deep inside. As such, the emotion of words form a highly efficient medium for psycho-politically steering the integral person as a whole.
No comments:
Post a Comment