Meet the Solutionists, with Mark Scott

Can you be friends with someone who doesn’t know you exist?

It’s a legitimate question for members of fandoms – groups of people brought together by a shared passion for an artist, sports team, celebrity or piece of media. At the centre of these groups is a parasocial relationship: a one-sided connection with a public figure. If you’ve heard the term before, it probably hasn’t been in a positive light...

Dr Georgia Carroll, an expert on fan culture and Australia’s go-to scholar on Taylor Swift, says the way we understand parasocial relationships is a bit lop-sided. “Parasocial relationships are just one part of our social worlds, and they can be a really healthy, identity-building piece of the pie.”

But that’s not to say they can’t go wrong. Georgia explains what happens at the extreme ends of the parasocial spectrum, and outlines how social media and artificial intelligence are rapidly changing the nature of these relationships. She also unpacks Taylor Swift’s highly lucrative marketing strategy and how it purposely leans into parasocial connections with fans. 

Mark Scott  00:01

This podcast is recorded at the University of Sydney's Camperdown campus on the land of the Gadigal people of the Eora nation. They've been discovering and sharing knowledge here for tens of thousands of years. I pay my respects to elders past and present, and extend that respect to all Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people.

Ruby  00:27

My relationship with Taylor Swift, I know people call it parasocial, and I know that that's the right word for it, and I know she doesn't know me at all. But despite all of those things for me, like ever since I was 13 and I discovered 'Teardrops On My Guitar’, like she has been the big sister I never had. My name's Ruby. I'm an English and media teacher in Yarrawonga Victoria on the Murray River. And I have, in the past, been referred to as Australia's biggest Swiftie. So biggest Taylor Swift Fan. I went to the Eras tour seven times, and the first one of all was Sydney night two, and I was front row at the end of the cat walk, and her piano for the surprise songs was like literally parked right in front of me, like it was just she was meters from me, and as she sung those lyrics, “But is it enough?” She looked up at me and she shook her head, and we had direct eye contact. And it was just like, all of my how many years by that point, like 12 years of being a Swiftie had sort of like, what's the word, resulted in that moment. And she's shaking her head at me as if she doesn't feel like she's enough, and I was nodding back to her, saying like no you, you are enough for me.

Mark Scott  02:15

Can you be friends with someone who doesn't even know you exist? Social scientists would say, yes, they call it a parasocial relationship. Once the term was linked to stalkers or fans who blurred fantasy with reality. But today, it's just as likely to describe the millions who feel that someone like pop icon Taylor Swift is their confidant, even though she'll never know their names, and increasingly, these bonds are being forged, not just with celebrities, but with AI chat bots too. But how real are these relationships? Do they enrich our lives or corrode them? Could they be a cure for loneliness or part of the problem? This is The Solutionists, and I'm Mark Scott. Dr Georgia Carroll is a PhD graduate from the University of Sydney, and she's a self-described Swifty and Australia's go to expert on Taylor Swift and her fan base, an artist who's built a billion dollar empire not just on her music, but on the powerful illusion that she knows her fans personally. 

Georgia, what exactly is a parasocial relationship? And can you give me an example?

Georgia Carroll  03:32

A parasocial relationship is just the one-sided connection we feel to celebrities. It's a term that was first coined back in 1956 so it's not a new term at all, and it refers to the fact that when we engage primarily with celebrities. But that has changed over time as social media has evolved. But originally it was talking about TV stars and radio hosts, and as we were exposed to them over and over again, they began to feel like a real character in our social worlds. So we can think about it. Think about the fact that, you know, celebrities are paid so much money for exclusive wedding photos and baby announcements and all of these things where we get a peek into their lives, and suddenly we're like, oh, I know who they're married to. I know who their children are, and it's kind of an everyday occurrence in our media saturated world. But what the term has increasingly come to mean is these more intense relationships that fans form with celebrities within fandom communities. When most people use the term they're referring to, for example, the Swifties, who do feel as though they know her and that if she just met them, it would be a reciprocated friendship relationship. And you also hear about it, the stereotypical teenage girl in love with the boy band. And at the extreme end, we have the idea that it can turn into stalking and these unhealthy pathologised relationships where the fan becomes so deluded that they cross boundaries.

Mark Scott  05:13

For a long time, there's been celebrities and fan magazines and the like, and we've known about famous people, you know, because they're famous. So where do you draw that line between a casual fan who has awareness of a celebrity and someone who's in a full blown parasocial relationship with a celebrity?

Georgia Carroll  05:32

So just like any behavior, parasocial relationships and our relationships with celebrity exist on a spectrum, and so at the far end of the spectrum, we do have fans who take things too far, and so that can look like as extreme as actually stalking the celebrity in real life. And you know, you hear multiple stories about that every year, but it can also just be being way too intense on social media and following their every move and kind of trying to find patterns in what they're doing. Some of it is ultimately harmless, and you know, it's something you grow out of, but it becomes a lot more of a red flag if it's your only form of social engagement, like you don't have other forms of friendships and social network and you're just fully focused and zoned in on that celebrity. Your whole life revolves around them, and you feel as though you do know them, and they know you in a way that isn't realistic. Like most fans, you know they'll be like, Oh yes, Taylor. Like, could be my friend, but they realistically know that no, like, that's never going to happen.

Mark Scott  06:39

We're hearing more and more about parasocial relationships as the social internet becomes more sophisticated and more common in our day to day lives, to what extent has the changing shape and opportunity of media engagement changed the nature of these relationships?

Georgia Carroll  06:53

Yeah, it's changed it to a huge extent, because historically, there were a lot of gatekeepers between yourself and a celebrity. So it was, you know, the agents and the publicists and the media industry deciding what information would be shared, when and how and through what channels. But over the past 20 years, with this huge increase in social media, we have seen this whole new way of engaging with celebrities that has become increasingly -- it's not actually reciprocated in two way, but it feels as though it is because if you're following them, for example, on Instagram, especially Instagram, like 10 years ago, they would be sharing images of themselves in your feed, amongst photos of your real life friends, and so in your brain, that connection of how you view the celebrity and how you view their personal life begins to get a bit skewed. And then we've seen it even more in the past five years, kind of since the dual increase of the covid pandemic and Tiktok, where the short form videos and when celebrities, especially during that first year of the pandemic, were also at home and were revealing a lot more of themselves through short form video. That has also increased how we connect and the illusion of access to them. They're kind of always on. We don't have to wait for the big media moments. They can just record and be in amongst our real social networks on our phones.

Mark Scott  08:25

So they're one-sided relationships, and we'll talk about some of the celebrities who've been very adept at it. They're building a brand. But what is the fan getting out of such a relationship?

Georgia Carroll  08:40

When we kind of look at parasocial relationships, when you really dig into it, it becomes less about the celebrity themselves and more about the community and the world around the celebrity. So when fans connect with celebrity, it's often because of a shared identity characteristic, because there's something relatable with them. But what's more important than that is the fact that that means other fans will also be connecting for similar reasons, and they build a community that allows them to explore their identity, find a sense of belonging, and kind of discover who they are, especially when they are younger. We see this a lot in fandoms with people in their teens and early 20s. So yes, it's about the relationship with the celebrity, but it becomes more about what the scholar Matt Hills calls a multisocial relationship, and that's where the more important part isn't the parasocial connection you feel with a celebrity, it's the relationship with all the other fans who share that parasocial relationship with you.

Vinoj  09:49

After first encountering Taylor's music on the radio and falling in love with it, I began to delve deeper into her discography through YouTube, listening to her songs, falling in love with every album she would release, and eventually discovering who she was as a person. I just fell in love with the way she interacted with fans, how humble she was and how much effort she put into her music, making it so personal and thought out. Hi, my name is Binod. I'm a master of public health student in Melbourne, and I'm a huge fan of Taylor Swift. My first introduction to the Fandom of Taylor Swift and Swifties was during the pandemic. I had been a fan of Taylor's music for many years before that, but I think during the pandemic, when we were in social isolation and lockdown, and everyone was feeling so lonely, I decided to join social media and interact with other fans, talk about how we connect with Taylor's music and what we enjoy about it, and it really helped me feel like I was part of a community and find some social interactions during a period where we couldn't really meet up in person. Over the years, I have had the opportunity to meet up with many fans that I had met online, and we've become friends in person. And I've met these people all over the world when I've traveled. I've met up with fans when I was in Toronto, in New York, in Pittsburgh, even for one of her concerts, and it's just a really special moment when you can finally meet someone that you've been talking to for years and actually see them in person. These relationships start off as just online friendships where we're talking about music, concerts that we've been to, merch that we've bought, stuff like that. But as you know the time progresses, we just become regular friends. We talk about anything that friends would - life, what we're doing in school, anything really.

Mark Scott  11:59

Now you've done a lot of media and a lot of writing and research on Taylor Swift. What is it about Taylor Swift that drew your attention? Why is she a main interest and focal point as you've done this research?

Georgia Carroll  12:11

I have been a Taylor Swift fan myself since I was 14, which is now more than half of my life. I kind of grew up in that perfect age group of Taylor, where I'm a few years younger than her. So as I say, and as my research participants would tell me, it feels as though we grew up with her. So I became a fan, as I said, when I was 14, and she released the album Fearless, which has the song Fifteen on it, about you know, being in high school and having, like, your first high school crush, and all the complications of that, and as she's aged, you know, we're that one step behind her. And this theme that came out in my research was that fans feel as though she is either the cool, older best friend or kind of the big sister giving advice. And because I had observed that in my own personal fandom and my personal life, when I was beginning my research into fandom communities and what makes fans want to meet celebrities, it kind of clicked in my brain. I was like, this would be a really interesting case study.

Mark Scott  13:12

And in that example that you've given us about these parasocial relationships and the sense that I'm her friend, if she knew me, I would be her friend, did you feel that, that you had that relationship with Taylor Swift, you know, particularly, maybe when you were younger?

Georgia Carroll  13:31

Yeah and I think when I was definitely kind of that high school age, and you're listening to that music, you're kind of like, yeah, you know, she gets me, she's singing these like deeply personal songs. And they're, they're things that I also have experienced. So it's like if, if I met her, surely she would, surely she would like get who I am as a person, too. What she did that is so clever, is she, you know, plays into, and I always say she's like a politician, because when she meets fans, she has her people research the fans beforehand. So just like a politician meeting a potential donor, and you always see it on like, political TV shows, they go in and they shake their hand. Like, oh, you're like, Hi, Mrs. So and So. Like, how were the children? I heard your daughter just got married, blah, blah, blah. That's what she does. She'll go into a room and she'll run up to a fan and be like, Oh my god, like, I just heard that. You know, you've got a new boyfriend, your new haircut looks amazing. Congratulations on getting into this college. And it feels as though she has been following the fan on social media and that she has been keeping up with their life. And it does feel reciprocated.

Mark Scott  14:38

One of the interesting things about Taylor Swift is that she grew as an artist as the media fundamentally changed, and it's not just buying magazines or looking at newspapers or the six o'clock news. To what extent has her growth and her ability to kind of shape this kind of connection been very much a factor of the changing media environment? Particularly the growth of social media, and that people aren't just consumers of media, but they're creators of media now and sharers of media.

Georgia Carroll  15:07

Yeah, it's played a big role in her career and her trajectory. She's been very quick to evolve with every social media platform as it has come out. She was very big on Tumblr for a long time, which was, is the fan centric social media site, where she knew where her fans were, where they were creating, and how they were creating, and she would send them messages. She would re blog their posts. And not many celebrities were engaging in that way. Everybody was on, you know, on Twitter, everybody's now on Tiktok, but she was finding her fans where they were and learning how to speak their language and encouraging certain forms of participation and creation. And she engages with her fans a lot less now, but we still see her on Tiktok and she'll pop up in certain comment sections or invite certain she was inviting certain Tiktok creators to the Eras tour because she knew that was where the growth was. So she's been very clever as technology has evolved.

Mark Scott  16:07

Are you ever worried that it's manipulative? I mean, I'm wondering if I'm too harsh here, but it's one thing for there to be a photo spread once upon a time in a magazine. It's another thing to use the extraordinary powers of social media to somehow develop a feeling that this person knows you, loves you, cares for you, respects you, is a friend of yours when really they have no idea who you are. Does that worry you?

Georgia Carroll  16:38

Yeah, and certain tactics worry me more than others, and this was something I had to kind of come to grips with my the more I studied Taylor. One of her biggest tactics is her team, Taylor Nation. They are responsible for inviting fans to meet Taylor. So if you ever get picked, as fans say, to meet her, it'll come through Taylor Nation. The main fans that they engage with on social media are fans who share their receipts after they've spent money on merchandise. So fans know that if they drop all of this money, they screenshot their receipt, they post it on social media and go, Hey, look at me. I've spent all of this money. That's a chance for them to get on the radar of Taylor and her team, and they have encouraged this behavior over years and years as a way to be seen as the right kind of fan, and then now other celebrities are kind of following in those footsteps, and it's like, Oh, are we really reducing our worth to who can spend the most money? You know, that was a question I wanted to answer in my research. Like, what happens when you can't? What happens when you're not able to participate in these ways? Does that mean, like, how do you come to terms with not being seen as a valuable fan? So it can be manipulative, and it becomes very competitive, and it can become quite nasty within the fan base, as much as it is also a community, because the fans fight each other, because attention is a finite resource, and ultimately they want to be the one who gets it.

Mark Scott  18:01

We've talked a bit on this podcast in the past about AI and the extraordinary transformation we've seen in the AI environment, particularly in recent years, with the large language models and getting more and more sophisticated over time. Now we hear about new relationships being developed with AI chatbots, more common, more sophisticated. Is that in the same set as parasocial relationships, that you don't really have a relationship with that celebrity, you don't really have a relationship with that chatbot, but is that chatbot feeding the same thing as parasocial relationships?

Georgia Carroll  18:36

To an extent, but where we see a lot of crossover is there are particular chatbots, such as character AI, who are developed specifically to pretend to be fictional characters and prey on this idea of a parasocial relationship. So you can log in and act like you are talking to your favorite book character, and it will talk back to you. And we have already seen bad outcomes from this, least of all, you know, the fact that it's trained on stolen data. Like authors haven't given their permission for their books to be uploaded into these systems. But the problem with these systems is they solve the initial desire for fans to connect more with the character, the celebrity, the persona, but they take the social element out of it. It becomes a one to robot transaction versus, I'm on social media, talking about Taylor Swift, talking about Oscar Piastri, talking about whoever with other people.

Mark Scott  19:35

So you're no longer in a community, you're on your own.

Georgia Carroll

Yes. And that's where it's dangerous. 

Mark Scott

But even in the community question, Melody Ding, an academic here at Sydney we spoke to on the podcast about the loneliness epidemic, and at a time then we've never been more connected with more people using technology, the evidence would suggest we've never been more alone. I'm interested, and I'm kind of curious listening to you, I'm there thinking, parasocial relationships, is this a great thing, or is this a terrible thing, or is it something in between?

Georgia Carroll  20:11

So I think it can be a positive thing, as long as it's not the end of all you're doing, but when, especially again, if you're a teenager, and because we do see these relationships more extreme in teenagers and young adults, it's like a stepping stone. It's a way to feel less alone in that moment. So you feel as though that celebrity, you can connect with them, the music, the book, the TV show, the athlete. It's something to hold on to while you establish your identity while you establish your place in the wider world. Parasocial relationships are just one part of our social worlds. They can't be all your social interaction, and you do need those, you know, the real world socialising, but it can be a really healthy and beneficial and identity building, you know, piece of the pie.

Mark Scott  21:11

What happens next? If you can, can you throw forward 10 years? I'm kind of wondering if we are at peak parasocial relationships, you know, peak social media, or whether you think this could just grow and grow and grow and even technological kind of breakthroughs making it seem even easier to be closer to a celebrity and know a celebrity, even if it's still an illusion really.

Georgia Carroll  21:40

Yeah, it's so hard to know because technology is evolving so quickly. But when we look through history, we can see that even back hundreds of years, the underlying behavior has never changed, and it is just technology amplifying it on scale that is the difference. So I don't think fan behavior inherently is ever going to change. We're still going to desire that connection. It's a human need to want to find a sense of self and a connection with people we like. But yeah, what does technology allow us to do next? I think there's a danger around what AI is going to make possible, because, as I said, that takes a lot of the social out of it, but also it raises questions around ownership of celebrity image and celebrity face and voice, and what are we going to be talking to in the future, like, what are the tech bros going to be handing to us and saying, here, connect with this robot. But actually it's pretending it's your favorite celebrity. Like I think there's, there needs to be some guard rails in place, but I think fans are always going to find each other. Fandom has always been about community and about finding others that share that love, so I don't think that will change, but it's yeah, what is technology going to look like? If I could predict that, I would be a lot richer than I am!

Mark Scott  23:08

Indeed, same with all of us. 

That's Dr Georgia Carroll, fandom expert and professional Swiftie. And if you're interested in ways that our modern social lives are influenced by factors like technology and even the designs of our city, make sure you listen to our episode on the loneliness epidemic with Professor Melody Ding.

Melody Ding  23:31

Loneliness and social isolation, they're both bad. They're both bad for our mental health and physical health, and they might affect our health in different ways, but we need to tackle them both. 

Mark Scott  23:49

The Solutionists is a podcast from the University of Sydney produced by Deadset Studios.

The Solutionists is podcast from the University of Sydney, produced by Deadset Studios. Keep up to date with The Solutionists by following @sydney_uni Facebook and Instagram, and @sydney.edu.au on Bluesky.

This episode was produced by Liam Riordan with sound design by Jeremy Wilmot. Supervising producer is Sarah Dabro. Executive editors are Kellie Riordan, Jen Peterson-Ward, and Mark Scott. Strategist is Ann Chesterman.

This podcast was recorded on the land of the Gadigal people of the Eora nation. For thousands of years, across innumerable generations, knowledge has been taught, shared and exchanged here. We pay respect to elders past and present and extend that respect to all Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people.