Mass Communication and Para-Social Interaction: Observations on Intimacy at a Distance
TL;DR — The 1956 paper that named parasocial interaction — sixty years before it described everyone’s relationship with the internet.
Originally Psychiatry 19 (1956); this is the Particip@tions Vol. 3 (1) reprint.
Horton and Wohl were watching early television and noticed that viewers formed one-sided relationships with performers who addressed them directly but could not know they existed — an intimacy with no reciprocity, sustained by the medium’s conventions.
Written about TV hosts in 1956 and now the single most useful frame for understanding creators, streamers and influencers. The mechanism they describe was not created by the internet; it was industrialised by it.
Where this came from
23 pages. A copy is archived locally against link rot; the header links the original source.