Parasocial Relationships
QUOTE
William Shakespeare once said…
“How far that little candle throws his beams!”
(English playwright and poet)
CONCEPT
Parasocial Relationships
A parasocial relationship is a one-sided bond in which a person feels close to someone who isn’t as connected (or connected at all) in return.
The term was coined in 1956 by sociologists Donald Horton and Richard Wohl, who noticed that television and radio performers were producing something new: the feeling of friendship, at scale, without any of the reciprocity friendship normally requires.
STORY
Speaking to Millions … One Child at a Time?
On May 1, 1969, a soft-spoken 41-year-old man in a suit sat down in front of a United States Senate subcommittee, and the chairman looked at him the way you look at a waste of an afternoon.
The Nixon administration had proposed cutting federal funding for public broadcasting from $20 million to $10 million. Fred Rogers had come to Washington to argue against it.
Senator John Pastore of Rhode Island, who chaired the subcommittee, had never seen Mister Rogers' Neighborhood and had never heard of the man in front of him. His opening line was close to dismissive: alright, Rogers, you have the floor.
Rather than argue about budgets, Rogers described what he actually did for a living.
He explained that his program was built around one deceptively simple idea: that every child deserves to be told, by an adult who means it, that they are likable exactly as they are. Then he asked the senator whether he could recite the words to one of his songs—a song about what a child does with the anger they feel when they want to bite, or hit, or wreck something.
He recited it. In a Senate hearing room. To a group of grown men.
Six minutes after Rogers began, Pastore said that he had goosebumps, and that it looked like Rogers had just earned the twenty million dollars. Funding for public broadcasting was not cut—it rose from roughly $9 million to $22 million in the period that followed.
What Pastore had experienced, in compressed form, was the thing Rogers had built his entire career around: the sensation of being personally addressed by someone who cares.
Rogers understood the power of that mechanism better than almost anyone, and he treated it as an obligation rather than a tool. He spoke to the camera as though to one child. He paused, on purpose, long enough for a child at home to answer. He wrote all 895 episodes himself. And he woke at 5:00 am to personally answer the letters that arrived—often 50 to 100 a day.
The relationship was one-sided by the nature of television, but Rogers spent thirty-three years refusing to let it stay that way.
Speaking to Millions … One Child at a Time?