Abstract
Originally described by Donald Horton and R. Richard Wohl in 1956, parasocial relationships are one-sided relations that consumers have with television characters. This phenomenon has been studied from an array of different perspectives with regard to different relationship types, but until now, the research had not entered the political arena. Jason Zenor’s collection of work on the subject closes that gap in our knowledge.
Beginning with a wonderfully stated and illustrative introduction, Zenor explains that reception studies have historically been interested in the “role that mass media plays in determining an audience’s political reality.” He then goes on to describe that in our media-saturated world, it is nearly impossible for a consumer to separate entertainment from information, and in the political landscape, such a distinction may be detrimental. Perhaps more importantly, Zenor then makes the connection between “citizen” and “fan”—they both follow their favorite celebrity figures carefully, endorse them to other people, measure them against each other, and ultimately reach informed conclusions and judgments. If this book needed to justify its existence, this discussion alone could do it.
Here, decades of media studies, and social learning theory in particular, have demonstrated that consumers learn from the media. Learning about politics is no different. Adding the parasocial lens to this subject, Zenor explains that consumers can also form attachments to political figures. It is this phenomenon that Zenor refers to as “parasocial politics.”
As the backbone of this discussion, the book presents a collection of empirical studies that show how consumers create meaning about political issues through this unique consumer-character/political figure relationship. The studies included in the text are methodologically diverse (surveys, experiments, focus groups, mixed methods, etc.) and are divided into three sections.
The first section focuses on how audiences create meaning about government and politics based on the media depictions of these institutions. For example, Zenor uses The West Wing as an artifact and looks at how consumers adhering to different political ideologies responded to the show.
The second section of the collection is specifically concerned with the impact of fantasy texts on politics and culture. Entries in this section include investigations into “Trekkies” and their level of governmental trust and the impact of Batman comics on the prevailing negative feelings toward Islam since the introduction of a Muslim superhero.
Finally, the third section looks at audience engagement and cultural diversity in the media. Here, guest authors examine contemporary television shows like How I Met Your Mother, Scandal, and The Good Wife for how they deal with issues of naturalization, as well as how the fan sites related to these popular shows engage in discourse about race.
If there were to be a criticism of this book, it would be that it lacks a solid definition of the “parasocial relationships” that “parasocial politics” stems from. In the field, many classifications of the term exist ranging from a simple fan of a character, to a form of interpersonal relationships with the character that can never be realized. There are also questions of whether this parasocial relationship is with the character or the actor playing the character. In this text, different chapters deal with different definitions of parasocial relationship. For example, one can be in the form of interpersonal relationship with Olivia Pope from Scandal, or with Kerry Washington the actress. Meanwhile, there is no mortal actor representing a new character in the Batman comic series. At the same time, a consumer can be a fan of the character without forming the levels of identification or internalization necessary in an interpersonal bond.
In the end, this book is different from other texts on politics because it examines the issues from an audience standpoint—how the audience forms relationships with the political “characters” and how this represents a nexus between the real and fictional worlds. The chapters in the collection are diverse in tradition, methodology, and genre, making the book a pleasant read for any media scholar or student interested in audience relationships, opinion, and decision making. In addition, the mixed methodology and diverse tradition approach make this text applicable to both media studies, as well as mass communication and media effects research.
Ultimately, when combined, the chapters in this book highlight the best of what parasocial research has to offer—that these seemingly insignificant relationships between consumers and media characters have large and meaningful implications. In this particular book, those implications are cultural and political, but “Parasocial Politics” serves notice that the field of communication should now consider different areas of this relationship, for example, with children, gender, LGBTQ (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer), and so on, to be fair game for future books.