"I Feel Like I'm Friends With My Favorite Idols": Understanding Para-Social Relationship

The Korean wave has been successfully conquered around the world. It has been seen in everything from K-Pop, Korean dramas, and Korean foods to Korean cosmetics. On top of that, K-Pop has become the major industry that has successfully influenced the young generation with their music, performance, and even their persona.

The youth actively support their favorite groups by buying the merchandise, coming to their concert, participating in promotional events, and subscribing to a virtual application to keep up interaction with their favorite idols. Those activities can be the main factor in the emergence of certain emotional connections with their favorite idols. The youth consider themselves as knowing celebrities' real-life personalities even though they consciously know their idol did not know their existence. This connection can be called a Para-social relationship.

According to anthropologist Donald Horton and sociologist R. Richard Wohl in 1956, a Para-social relationship is a one-sided relationship that is imagined with media figures and celebrities. This commonly happens between fans and public figures, not only celebrities, but also musicians, athletes, gamers, YouTubers, and even fictional characters. Living in the middle of internet popularity, this relationship can enhance through social media platforms, particularly Twitter and Instagram. Public figures use their persona in some content that they provide to attract people, so they feel like they have attachment. On the front stage, idols relied on some form of role-playing and stage performance to captivate fans. Nevertheless, nowadays, their company also provides some form of daily side content or hidden behind the camera content, or in another word, 'behind the scenes'. Here, fans can get to know a portion of their idols' private life. Furthermore, a study shows that the more celebrities share with fans, the higher degree to which fans engage in Para-social relationships (Zhang, 2022).

Para-social relationships sound strange at first, but this is common in everyday life. People have the right to love someone even if it is only a one-sided relationship. The existence of idols perhaps becomes inspiration and motivation for some people. However, they have to know their limits. At a certain level, Para-social relationships can cause obsession, aggressiveness, delusion, and other bad behavior. So, just love them enough because yourself and your life are more important.

Sources:

Horton, D., & Richard Wohl, R. (1956). Mass Communication and Para-Social Interaction. Psychiatry, 19(3), 215--229. https://doi.org/10.1080/00332747.1956.11023049

Zhang, Y. (2022). A Study on the Para-social Interaction Between Idols and Fans in Virtual Applications. Proceedings of the 2021 International Conference on Social Development and Media Communication (SDMC 2021), 631(Sdmc 2021), 1118--1124. https://doi.org/10.2991/assehr.k.220105.205