Social Media Is Now Parasocial Media

In the early 2000s, lots of terms were floating in the air to describe the technologies that we now call social media. The term “social media” first emerged in the 1990s, but it was used to refer to content being shared rather than operating as a label for describing protocols and services like Usenet or AOL. It wasn’t until years later that the medium became the message. ¹

In the aftermath of the dot-com crash, those who were passionate about online communities were looking for terms to capture what made these internet-mediated social connections special. At the time, most terms that attempted to pin down practices or tools were contested, primarily by bloggers or among participants in the very online communities that people were trying to describe. Academics were trying to elevate terms like “social computing,” which emerged a decade earlier to describe “any type of computing application in which software serves as an intermediary or a focus for a social relation” (Schuler, 1994). Tech pundits tried to push “Web 2.0” to refer to the wide range of new websites, but the general public never embraced this geeky label. Clay Shirky (2003) coined the term “social software” while arguing that “software should somehow strengthen and enhance human connections rather than impede them.” His term resonated with some, but bloggers never saw their own practices in these terms (boyd, 2007a). Of course, no one could agree on what blogging was either (boyd, 2006).

The early aughts were a heady time for folks who saw the potential of the internet as a tool for connection and creativity. I was among those who spent hours at conferences and in online discussions trying to find language to capture what we were doing as we combined sociality and content production. We were trying to identify terms to describe both the practices themselves as well as the tools that allowed people to share content in order to connect with others. “User-generated content” came in many forms as people produced and disseminated text, audio (aka “audio blogs” or podcasting), images, links, and memes (Burgess and Green, 2009/2016; Shifman, 2013/2014). But what really mattered were the personal networks that were nurtured (Baym, 2010). Old media practices and new ones were converging (Jenkins, 2008). Terms like “Pro-Am” (pro-amateur), prosumer, and produsage were bandied about (Bruns, 2009). “Participatory culture” was deployed to highlight how people were not simply passive consumers; they were active contributors (Jenkins et al., 2015). We weren’t just using media to socialize; we were socializing on media, through media, and using media.

Since the early days of the internet, online communities were often formed in a distributed manner. Many participants hosted their own websites and plugged into the ecosystem through standards like RSS and application programming interfaces (API) that allowed people to consume others’ content using their desired tools. Yes, there were corporate-controlled destinations (e.g., AOL), but the internet was flourishing with decentralized tools like Usenet, which was nothing more than a protocol that connected servers. By the mid-2000s, the large growth in online communities centered around popular websites – later called “platforms” – like Friendster, MySpace, Flickr, and Digg, where people could share content information without trying to host their own tools. Platforms were easier than protocols, but control was centralized in the process.

I had a front row seat to the rise of these new socially oriented websites. As they were being developed, I tried to make sense of what people were doing with them through my blog and in talks. I initially described sites like Friendster as “publicly articulated social networks” (boyd, 2004). Reasonably, no one took up that name. Nicole Ellison and I ended up settling on “social network sites” (boyd & Ellison, 2007) before the consensus shifted to “social networking sites.” Despite being fascinated by the language that others used, I learned that coining terms was not my forte.

Many people genuinely believed that these tools would allow people to meaningfully express themselves, connect to people across the globe, and work to strengthen democracy (Papacharissi, 2010/2011). Others were focused on how digital social media enhanced physical connections (Humphreys, 2007). I was especially fascinated watching teenagers embrace social network sites in unexpected and creative ways to push back against the everyday constraints that they faced (boyd, 2007b, 2014; Marwick & boyd, 2011a). What young people were doing online was inspiring. And it was very sociable.

The term social media started to emerge to describe the broader set of services being created in the aughts shortly after Twitter became a sensation at the 2007 South-by-Southwest (SXSW)-Interactive conference (Burgess & Baym, 2020). Somehow, somewhere, in the coverage of Twitter’s rise in popularity, “social media” became the term that journalists, bloggers, and the public converged on to describe the collection of websites like Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube that people used to connect to others by posting content about their lives. I blame the dreadful term “micro-blogging” for upending the distinction between blogging and social networking. Over the next decade, “social media” subsumed all other terms. “Social media” also subsumed the very practice that term was initially attempting to label.

It was not inevitable that a few companies would create a small number of “platforms” that would dominate the diverse practices we imagined the term “social media” stood for, but that is what happened. Slowly, but surely, most social media platforms withered as a handful of companies/platforms became dominant and used both technology and policy to lock in their users (Gillespie, 2010). It was also not inevitable that corporations would exploit community and sociality, but they did (van Dijck et al., 2018). Moreover, it was not inevitable that these companies would convert these platforms into new channels for passive consumption where only a small number of users contributed content, but that too is what happened.

The practices that define social media in 2026 look extraordinarily different than the practices we were trying to document 20 years earlier. The “social” in “social media” has slowly become a misnomer. In 2006, most people who logged into the large platforms posted content because they were co-constructing sociable spaces to enjoy the companionship of others. In 2026, posting has waned (John, 2024); most social media users prioritize scrolling “amateur” content rather than posting their own haphazard updates for friends. The quality of the media on social media has become more strategically constructed, more intentionally curated, and more professional. Users are now lucky to see personal content that their friends are posting amid the slick content created by the advertisers and strategic creators who dominate most people’s feeds. What goes “viral” is now often manufactured in a lab, designed to appeal (Hund, 2023; Mears, 2023). Given the trajectories of the various platforms, this makes sense. In a world of algorithms, highly polished content is rewarded. Welcome to the era of influencers.

The major US social media platforms were always run by corporations, but the pursuit of financialized economic growth to appease investors led companies to contort their platforms away from sociality (Srnicek, 2019). Socializing among friends is not nearly as profitable as convincing users to consume more and more polished media. Sociality is not as assetizable as media, which itself can only be assetized to a point (Birch & Muniesa, 2020). In laying out his theory of enshittification, Cory Doctorow (2025) describes a three-stage phenomenon that depicts what platforms look like as they become assetized. First, platforms attract users with a great service. Second, once those users are locked in, companies begin to abuse their users to benefit their business customers, including advertisers. Third, once those business customers are also locked in, platform companies begin exploiting both users and business customers to appease investors. (In his fourth stage, platforms die.)

In 2026, many major social media platforms feel icky because we are in the full throes of the third stage of enshittification. Today’s social media platforms are no longer centered around sociable activities. Instead, most platforms offer us a broadcast medium and invite us to learn how to game the algorithms so that we too can create assets for the major corporations (Cotter, 2019). Since scale is valorized in this platform economy, we are encouraged to curate ourselves in pursuit of fame and attention. We can still, in theory, create content for our 15 friends, but it’s not clear that they will see what we post. To actually be seen, we must work it.

Of course, for many people, it’s not clear whether working it for the algorithm is worth it. For many people, the benefits of joking around with friends on social media doesn’t feel worth the potential privacy risks, reputational risks, and social risks. Scrolling is easier. Sending funny videos to friends via text message feels safer than reposting.

Because of these shifts, we now live in a world of parasocial media. Parasocial relationships are one-sided connections, where individuals keep tabs on the lives and movements of people – like celebrities – who do not know us and feel no pressure to reciprocate. In a parasocial world, people dedicate their attention and emotions to tracking the dramas of individuals who exist at a distance. Parasocial relationships can be emotionally intense, but they do not produce the kinds of social fabric that anchor us when we are struggling.

Parasociality is not a new phenomenon, but its evolution is entangled with media (Horton & Wohl, 1956). Mass media – from magazines to radio to TV – amplified the visibility of individual artists, sports stars, socialites, and politicians, turning them into celebrities that the public could observe. Social media initially created a bridge, allowing celebrities to connect with their fans and appear more authentic (Baym, 2018). And there have always been people who used platforms to perform to a range of audiences (Hogan, 2010). Social media platforms also allowed “micro-celebrities” to position themselves to gain attention (Marwick & boyd, 2011b; Senft, 2008). Recognizing the economic potential of these emergent practices, social media companies encouraged “creators” to become “influencers” by working the algorithms (Abidin, 2018; Duffy, 2022; Marwick, 2015).

The combination of algorithms, influencers, and corporate greed helped shift social media from a sociable space that celebrities and creators could leverage alongside everyday users into hyper-controlled platforms that rewarded those who could generate large audiences or create media that draws in large numbers of eyeballs (Christin & Lewis, 2021). Social media companies keep altering their algorithms to incentivize (and punish) creators as they wish, always with an eye on nudging users to scroll more, even if they post less (Are & Briggs, 2023; Caplan & Gillespie, 2020; Wu et al., 2021). After all, social media companies have discovered that keeping users scrolling is more financially profitable.

Shifting our orientation from social media to parasocial media is consequential. People can – and initially primarily did – use a wide range of social media to negotiate identity, strengthen relationships, build communities of interest, and find joy in the playfulness of interacting with others (Brock, 2020; Gray, 2009, 2018; Steele, 2021). In the process, they wove together a powerful social fabric, giving rise to tremendous dreams of social media’s potential to build solidarity, enable political movements, and connect the world. But those practices are no longer dominant, and because of that, what social media means has shifted.

Parasociality plays a more central role in today’s platforms than it once did. But parasocial relationships are a type of trickster. Attending to parasocial connections may be pleasurable for consumers, but doing so does not strengthen the collective social fabric. It is possible to experience loneliness despite spending hours emotionally engaged with others’ dramas if those interactions are not reciprocated. Even those who are producing content for the parasocial world struggle to navigate the contorted forms of intimacy that abound (Glatt, 2024). Friendship requires reciprocity and compassion. Parasocial media creates the conditions for people to objectify one another at a distance as mediatized objects, helping realize the different layers of toxicity that social media scholars document (Bailey, 2022; Banet-Weiser & Miltner, 2016; Suarez Estrada et al., 2022; Wong et al., 2025). So when people opt to devote their energy to tracking the latest TikTok star or scrolling content instead of nurturing interpersonal relationships, they are effectively amusing themselves to death. ²

In 2006, we imagined a social media ecosystem that prioritized strengthening connections through media rather than one that replaced connections with media. The nascent platforms did have many problems – they mirrored and magnified the good, bad, and ugly of everyday life. This prompted researchers, policymakers, and pundits to obsess over finding solutions to address the toxic and anti-social behaviors that unfolded in networked publics (Phillips, 2015; Vaidhyanathan, 2021). Content moderation had many problems (Gillespie, 2018; Roberts, 2021), but as the field of Trust & Safety evolved, many practitioners imagined that nurturing healthy online communities into being was possible. Researchers focused on tackling social media as a governance issue because of the importance of networked publics (Gorwa, 2024). And yet, social media kept shapeshifting.

Social media stopped being primarily about connecting socially a long time ago. People still use a range of technologies to connect to friends and build relationships, but we don’t call those technologies – like texting and group chats – “social media.” Media shared on platforms may support social connections by creating a common culture, just as media shared via TV or magazines did historically (Meyrowitz, 1986). But that is not the same as creating a digital space for sociality.

It is easy to look back and argue that we were naïve, but I don’t think that is fair. It was not inevitable that social media platforms would become the dumpster fire that they did become. But I do think that we made a mistake when we collectively agreed to call this phenomenon “social media.” That linguistic frame biased how we normatively interpreted the practices on these platforms.

I have come to accept that the tools of the present are not what many of us hoped they would be, but I continue to struggle with the terms we are using to label these platforms. I think that it’s time that we deprecate the label “social media” and begin to recognize that we are dealing with an era of “parasocial media.” I’m not looking to mourn the loss of online sociality (although I do feel the feels of elder nostalgia). Instead, I want the field to contend with how and why our conversations around governance, inequality, and sociality must evolve to deal with how social media has evolved into an entirely new category. Simply put, this genre of social media is not the same as what prompted the label in the first place. And our tools of analysis need to evolve as a result.