“This book offers a highly timely contribution to our understanding of the interplay between technology and humans. Its innovative conceptualization bridges psychology with a critical analysis of technology, integrating subjectivity and computing. The book offers a wealth of information and nuanced analyses, stimulating new avenues for interdisciplinary research and practice, and making it an indispensable resource for everyone interested in digitalization." — Prof. Dr. Georg Groh (Computing Scientist), TUM School of Computation, Information and Technology, Technische Universität München, Bavaria, Germany. The internet and digital technologies have fundamentally transformed parasocial dynamics. In The Shaping of the Parasocial Self, Johanna Degen shows how significantly contemporary subjects are shaped by the parasocial. Drawing on a range of empirical studies on dating apps, social media, platforms like OnlyFans, and AI therapy chatbots, this book provides a nuanced and complex analysis. It is a significant psychosocial study which delivers a much-needed perspective on a topic that is often either blindly critiqued or celebrated. A must-read for anyone interested in the expanding relationship between humans and platforms today. — Jacob Johanssen, Associate Professor in Communications, St Mary’s University. This book offers innovative and integrative psychological theorizing on the meaning of parasocial relationships, drawing on cutting-edge empirical insights and clinical observations. It advances current understandings and operationalizations of parasociality, emphasizing both potential benefits and inherent challenges. Uniquely, the book explores various digital spheres, ranging from online dating and social media to subscription platforms like OnlyFans and AI-driven chatbots, including ChatGPT, AI-companions, and therapy bots. It highlights their specific characteristics, overarching similarities, dynamic entanglements, and finally, their meaning for the social self. Through this lens, the book examines how individuals initiate and sustain relationships, how intimacy is experienced online, and how these digital practices extend beyond the internet, materializing in everyday life, and impacting meaning-making and broader societal organizing. Finally, the book provides both conceptual ideas on media and AI literacy and psychological implications, relevant for professionals in social work and education, counselling and psychotherapeutic contexts, policymakers, and everyone who is online. Dr. Johanna L. Degen is a social psychologist and critical psychology scholar currently affiliated as a senior researcher and lecturer with the Europa-Universität Flensburg, Germany. She is studying relationships, intimacy, and sexuality with a focus on the meanings of digitalization for the self, subjects, and sociality. Her research focuses on different digital spheres, including mobile online dating, social media, subscription platforms, and AI-driven chatbots and their materialization in the world and everyday life. Besides her research, she is a systemic couple and family counselor and integrative sex therapist. In this book, she combines insights from both worlds, her empirical findings and the current state of research, and observations from clinical practice, which she brings together to theorize contemporary parasociality and its evolving significance. |