The crowded silence of influencers
When discussions about parasocial relationships began to emerge on social media, I immediately thought of the youtube channel “Best Dressed”. I discovered the channel quite late after it was created by Ashley, when she was gaining a lot of followers, and I was gaining a lot of experience in social media marketing through my job. I looked at influencers with a distant and cold eye: I knew about the brand strategies, the budgets, and their effect on the content created by people who claimed to show their authentic selves. To be honest I was bored.
Ashley was a breeze of fresh air: the way she talked to her camera, her self-deprecating jokes, her earnest story-telling about herself, all of it felt real and new. She talked about sex, about love, about style, about movies… the way I could hear my friends talk. She sounded just like them! And I really wanted to continue the conversation with her.
Wikipedia defines Parasocial interaction as “a kind of psychological relationship experienced by an audience in their mediated encounters with performers in the mass media. Viewers or listeners come to consider media personalities as friends, despite having no or limited interactions with them.”
Others than me shared parasocial relationships with Ashley. In the last video she uploaded on Youtube seven months ago, she gives a tour of the apartment she rented in New York. She concludes the video by saying she only makes this video because she’s leaving this place: a stalker found her exact address, threw a roll of toilet paper at her window to ask her out, and promised her to not “bury her in the woods”.
This video was seven months ago. She stopped posting on Youtube, without explaining her choice to her audience. Was it because of the stalker? Was she burned out by her newfound fame? The comments under the last video are compassionate and hopeful: “We miss you. Hope you are okay. Take as long as you need. Don’t feel pressured to post 💕”. This is exactly what I was thinking, but the overwhelming number of comments saying they miss her must feel like a lot of pressure, if she ever reads them.
Right now she only posts some Instagram stories & posts, mostly for brand deals, affiliated links to recreate her outfit. She made a couple of Tiktoks, where she gives us small insights into what is happening in her life: a tough breakup, a karaoke song, a poem. But she stopped posting the long videos I liked, the ones that felt real & raw. Her disappearance from Youtube sparked a few videos by commentary channels about big YouTubers who stopped posting. Where does influence go to die?
Ashley makes me think of the Marquise Madeleine de Sablé, a French noblewoman of the XVIIth century, whose life has been recounted by Benedetta Craveri in The Age of Conversation. In her work, Craverri describes the power of noble and cultured women’s main battlefield, the salons. Like many women before and after her, Madame de Sablé went to salons to chat, mostly about literature, religion, and love. Her own salon was the place where the famous writings of La Rochefoucauld gained popularity. Her influence was huge: she relayed the debates and controversies about the hot topic of the time, the Christian notion of Grace. But at fifty-six years old, Madame de Sablé decided to leave “the world” and to semi-retire from her role of literary influencer to the Jansenist convent of Port-Royal des Champs, outside Paris.
Leaving the world to devote your life to the preparation of your death was not so uncommon in the XVIIth century, just a bit unusual. The idea then was to live a somewhat dissolute life in “the world” during the first years of your life and then make amends when you met a certain age. Her decision was not met with disbelief from her followers, as it was more expected than Ashley’s silence on Youtube. Ashley is not fifty-six after all. And Madeleine did not retire entirely, she invented a hybrid place to live in. In the countryside, inside a convent but not a nun herself, she had her own house where friends could visit her, and direct access to the church to pray.
It is not something Craveri talks about in her book, but I love to imagine the fatigue of Madame de Sablé. She explicitly talked about the difficulty of concealing your own thoughts in her Maxims (published after her death) and I guess she navigated in a very judgmental world where your faults could lead you not only to “being canceled”, but to literal hell. In a world full of drama and gossip, she needed a place far from it. She did not retire entirely from the world (like Ashley and her Tiktok posts), but she hated the social obligations of her time: “One needs help to leave the world, one does not need such to hate it”. I can’t help thinking that the burnout Ashley might have experienced in the past months may be close to what Madeleine and other noblewomen had to experience a couple of centuries ago. Conversation burnout.
The dichotomy XVIIth century people made between the distracting “world” and the imperative of religion feels like a thing of the past. The time spent talking in balls and in salons on one hand, on the other hand, the time spent in silence, praying and meditating. The debate between Jesuits and Jansenists was a thing I learned about in high school. But with social media, I see such a dichotomy emerging, where there is the social media world, talkative, degrading and perverting, inauthentic and impure, and a more hidden world, the conversation we have face-to-face with friends, without the mediation of screens.
In Reclaiming Conversation, the media scholar Sherry Turkle argues how face-to-face conversation can help us regain our attention, creativity, productivity, but also ethics. Turkle describes screen time as a distraction from the real world: real conversations. She urges us to find real connections in our relationships and less in parasocial ones. The conversations Madame de Sablé hated are now the ones we are longing for. How the tables have turned!
Still, I wonder what Ashley talks about with her friends, what her meaningful conversations sound like. I won’t throw a roll of toilet paper at her place, I promise, but I still hope to hear some fragments of her maxims. Will she ever come back to her old ways, or will she, like Madame de Sablé, create a space in between the dichotomy? A semi-retirement that allows her to thrive creatively?
Or did she stop needing social media as a place for her voice? Everything has an end after all, or as Madame de Sablé said: “La société, et même l’amitié de la plupart des hommes, n’est qu’un commerce qui ne dure qu’autant que le besoin.”
Which roughly translates to:
Society, and even the friendship of most people, is a business that lasts only as long as necessary.
