It made for a pleasant night out, as the opening act was solid, and Johnson was exactly what I recalled him being. Only, you know, physically present.
As always, it was peculiar seeing a human being one knows only as an image on a screen actually standing on stage, close enough that I could have thrown him a football. If you know the limitations of my throwing arm, you know that meant we were quite nearby.
His first few bits were interesting, in a meta sort of way. Funny, naturally, and a pleasure to listen to, but also peculiarly recursive. He lamented how pathologically online he was, and how anxious all of that made him. He then proceeded to engage in a long retelling of an amusing video that's making the rounds. Which is exactly how I encountered him, and how I shared him with the person who bought me the tickets to come to see him.
So here's this actual human being, live and in the flesh, doing precisely what so many of us often do with one another when we gather these days. "Hey, Person We Actually Know," we say. "Would you like to look at this amusing thing that I just saw on my screen?" And so we share it, just as we've likely already shared it in whatever corporate media ecosystem we first encountered it, and we laugh together at some absurdity.
What aren't we sharing? Our actual life. That video is not a thing that happened to us. Nor is it something we're encountering organically. It's something that is being fed to us by semi-sentient systems designed to show us exactly what we want. It's not actually part of our life.
And here, I find that I'm increasingly at a remove from the flow of culture. The flow of culture is parasocial, and I am no longer significantly part of those systems.
Parasociality is the term used to describe our sense of relationship to a human being who we know only through media. We "know" the famous and the celebrated and the influential, and we project our desires for real human relationship onto them. I, for example, "know" Josh Johnson. He shares himself, or appears to, in his comedy routines. He projects a late night small room raconteur vibe, and it feels intimate. But it is not. Intimacy does not occur in a two thousand seat arena, or on Insta. He has no idea who I am, or who 99.975% of his audience is.
Now that I am no longer on social media, and have used a nifty Chrome extension to shut down all of the compulsion-engines of the still-useful Youtube, I realized that this is having a substantial impact on my ability to engage in this type of relationship. I am at a remove from the influences of influencers. More of my time is my own, because I have chosen not to connect. I have willfully withdrawn from parasociety.
I am, if you will, a parasociopath. Meaning, those flows of social exchange no longer run through me, not in the way they have been designed to flow. I no longer encounter an endless stream of amusements. I no longer receive most of my social information through algorithmic filters.
And unlike sociopathy, which is a particularly damaging pathology, parasociopathy seems necessary for our sanity, less a disease and more a healthy immune response. It's a bit like feeling overwhelming vertigo when standing next to a potentially lethal chasm, or having a fear of poisonous snakes. There's a necessity to it, the aversion of an organic system to something that does it harm.
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