Communication · Executive Insight Brief · 129
Familiar is not reciprocal
Mediated performers can feel socially present even when the relationship remains structurally one-sided
Premise
A host, executive, journalist, or creator can feel familiar to people who have never met them. Direct camera address, conversational pacing, personal disclosure, and repeated appearances activate social expectations associated with face-to-face encounter. Parasocial Interaction names this audience-side response while preserving a crucial limit: perceived intimacy is not mutual acquaintance.
Donald Horton and R. Richard Wohl introduced the concept in 1956 to describe an encounter structured by a stable public persona and a largely predetermined spectator role. Their account was interpretive, not a diagnostic scale or clinical condition. For executives, the concept helps distinguish communication that lowers social distance from claims of relationship, access, or obligation that the medium cannot support.
What the model is: Parasocial Interaction in Knowledge →
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- FamilyModel
- CategoryConcepts & Constructs
- DomainMedia, Publics & Society
What these mean
Editorial orientation · Family
Model
In this series, Model names the editorial family primarily used to understand and explain communication: theories, frameworks, effects, traditions, principles and other conceptual resources. It is an umbrella for a route into the field, not a claim that every included object is a predictive model.
Editorial orientation · Category
Concepts & Constructs
Delimits an entity, property, relation or condition relevant to understanding communication. Its principal contribution is to clarify what something means, which features constitute it, and how to recognize or distinguish it.
- KnowledgeParasocial Interaction