Illustration by Rachel Tunstall

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Hila Klein found out she was pregnant during a livestream with over 100K viewers. The live chat exploded:

“WHAT A SPECIAL MOMENT TO SHARE WITH THEM”

“Crying of happiness we got go share that moment with you”

“​I hope it's a girl so she can be like our queen Hila”

Hila, and her husband, Ethan Klein, have amassed millions of followers on YouTube over the last decade as the duo behind h3h3 Productions and co-hosts of the H3 podcast. Initially building their audience through comedy sketches and reaction videos, in the past few years their channel has centered around discussions and interviews pertaining to pop culture, politics, and the internet. They’ve also become experts at living life online. Before the big announcement, they had shared their desire to conceive a second child, discussing their struggles with fertility and giving their viewers insight into doctor’s visits and specialist’s advice. In an earlier video, Hila mentioned that they would bypass the customary three-month waiting period before telling people about getting pregnant, intentionally eschewing the taboo of discussing a potential miscarriage—their audience would be the first to know.

For online creators and internet influencers, sharing intimate details about their lives is now part of the job description. The audience is brought into the inner fold on marriages, break-ups, divorces, deaths, births, adoptions, illnesses. Creators speak directly to the viewer’s eye line on video, spend hours with watchers on live streams, or croon into the listener’s ears through the podcast mic. The openness and candor with which many online creators speak is more than many average people would divulge to friends and family, and more than friends and family might divulge to them.

For some, these information bytes form the basis of a parasocial relationship: instead of discussing a recent video posted by “someone they follow,” a fan might speak about “someone they know,” going so far as to refer to their favorite creator as a friend.

In 1956, Donald Horton and Richard Wohl coined the term “para-social relationship,” defined as a “seeming face-to-face relationship between spectator and performer.” Described in “Mass Communication and Para-Social Interaction,” they discuss these non-mutual relationships formed with people who appear on “radio, television, and movies”:

“The interaction, characteristically, is one-sided, nondialectical, controlled by the performer, and not susceptible of mutual development.”

The people capable of cultivating these relationships with an audience, described as “personae,” have specific skills and attributes that allow parasocial relationships to bloom with many people at once. “[The persona’s] appearance is a regular and dependable event,” and “devotees ‘live with him’ and share the small episodes of his public life – and to some extent even of his private life.” The result of these prolonged parasocial interactions is a bond between a fan and the object of their unreciprocated affection:

“In time, the devotee – the ‘fan’ – comes to believe that he ‘knows’ the persona more intimately and profoundly than others do; that he ‘understands’ his character and appreciates his values and motives.”

Horton and Wohl’s analysis does more than just hold up; it’s a prescient description of a phenomenon that occurs more frequently in our current age than in the one that came before. Their description of parasocial relationships—penned over six decades ago with Hollywood stars, television actors, and radio hosts in mind—feels like it was written about the current crop of online creators: the gamer hosting nightly streams, the podcaster dropping a new episode every Tuesday, or the daily vlogger revealing their morning routine.

But before the internet minted digital-first celebrities, the late ‘90s and early 2000’s marked the rise of reality television. The Real World premiered in 1992, following the lives of a group of young adults living together under the glare of non-stop filming in a single location. The voyeuristic view into their lives was compelling to audiences, as were the “confessional” segments where housemates spoke directly to the audience at home, chronicling their experiences in the house and in life.

In 2000, both Survivor and Big Brother premiered in the United States and viewers got to tune in for two things: the high-stakes competitions plus the quest for cash and the inner looks into the lives of the players—the clash of characters, the budding romances, and their “diary room” segments divulging secrets to those tuning in. On Big Brother, you could watch it all on-demand with the 24/7 live feeds that let you see into the house in between the airing episodes.