Thank you for establishing that you are above any introspection into your interaction with media, your jokes are hilarious and this thread is all the better for them
Well I guess for me my relationship to this stuff is, as I said, informed by the fact that I'm a fairly reclusive sort and the main reason I do most socialization-of-sorts on the internet is that it means there's already an inherently-enforced boundary to it all. When it comes to stuff like podcasts most of what I listen to is heavily scripted or structured like This American Life or The Beef and Dairy Network. I do listen to more free-wheeling stuff like MBMBAM but it usually just sort of becomes background noise as either my own cultural references are so far apart from theirs or my approach to viewing the world so different that I feel less like I am getting any sort of social reinforcement as I am being a traveler in a foreign country or an alien on a separate planet.
When it comes to something like Comedy Bang Bang, I watch this slightly less as a matter of "just folks hanging out" or whatever and more because I genuinely am interested in comedy as a craft. Sometimes I do like to think about the sorts of characters I would want to play on an improv show like this. I think the tension of the parasocial nature associated with RLM is part of the reason that the show works so well, because it's structured a lot like late-night interview shows of the Leno and Conan variety where celebrities usually come up with odd or embarrassing discussions that try to put them on a similar footing with just folks and remind us that amidst all the glitz and glamor that they're not as special as they're sold as being. What makes CBB interesting is that it does this with the obvious fact that beyond all this performative humanity, most of the people there are doing it with specific masks on. The show is, if it is about
anything, performing that performative humanity. Adding the extra layer of abstraction makes the nature of the interactions more clear, in a way. Easier to get at the root of the "I want to have a beer with this person" feeling when it is obvious that the person in question is a persona, a character being played.
When it comes to the weird grey areas here, I certainly don't bother following many big names on Twitch and in general I don't even watch those sorts of streams so much any more. When I do watch game stuff it's either longplays or other stuff (like GDQ) where any sort of personality by the participants is a secondary concern to the actual game content. Usually anyone I'm watching content of (especially these days!) is someone I also interact with outside of Twitch, so it's only parasocial in the sense that most of my interactions with others are pretty shallow.
Most socialization is performative anyway. "How are you?" "Fine, you" "Doin' OK, lookin' forward to making burritos later" is what you hear, not "How are you?" "I remain alienated by the desire of my fellow humans to seek actual meaning in a universe where our existence is matter-of-fact and not evidence of any grander scheme. As always I can only hope for the world to be less painful to others, especially the pain we bring on ourselves. And yet, despite saying this, I picked up Sonic '06 the other day and started playing it, as the struggle and frustration is a reminder on some level of what it means to be human". Frankly, while the latter would be more honest to my internal thought process, it sure is solipsistic, isn't it?
One of my favorite musicians is Manfred Mann and there's certainly a sort of
alignment between my own views on life and what I understand his to be based on interviews I've read or listened to. He's notorious for being a bit aggressive against interviewers and tends to be very unromantic both about his work ("sure, every interviewer says we're still selling out shows, but they don't mention they're much smaller halls!") and views on politics (with regards to the hippie movement and some of John Lennon's peace stuff: "if you walked up to a policeman in south africa and tried to stick a flower in his gun, they'd shoot you"). His view on touring these days is that he's not so concerned with success as he is about being able to play with folks he gets along with, and the process of touring is getting on a bus to some random German village and playing. It's not about getting in touch with the locals or trying the delicacy or visiting the town's prized architecture or anything like that -- it's playing the gig and making a living. I would assume that he's being fairly representative of himself in those discussions, and I find it refreshing that there's someone else who holds openly, for lack of a better term, mechanistic views of the industry rather than a particularly romantic one (though given that some of his greater commercial success was in the same-named band from the 60s and he rather openly rejected the pop market starting with the album the above song is taken from, his lack of romanticism of the market is strongly coupled with his decisions as a musician and probably relates to this frustration with some interviewers), as it's a voice that I can strongly relate to.
Whether or not that last paragraph is an irony is
left as an exercise for the reader.
