Future of Being Human an Arizona State University initiative

Parasocial communication

Last updated 2026-08-07 · Markdown version

“Parasocial” is a word most institutions flinch from — and Andrew Maynard has planted the initiative’s flag on it, in its best sense. The idea: the one-way but deeply felt relationships that audiences form with communicators, long dismissed as a pathology of celebrity culture, may be the most under-used channel through which expertise can empower people at scale — exactly what navigating transformative AI and other transformative technologies demands. It is why we run a podcast the way we do, it structured a federal project’s methodology, and it names a mode of scholarship that academia still typically punishes rather than rewards. The Modem Futura page shows the practice; this page carries the argument.

The argument

The argument starts from a familiar failure. When experts communicate with publics they typically default to transactional communication — information passed from those who have it to those who lack it — underwritten by the deficit model: the assumption that “bad” decisions simply reflect a deficit in understanding, which experts are happy to fix. In the anchor essay (2025-05-25), Andrew opens with academics baffled by popular support for Donald Trump in the 2024 US election and inverts the diagnosis: the most glaring deficit belonged to the experts, who failed to grasp how much relationships — including parasocial ones — shape how people think, behave, and decide. The deficit model, he notes, “has been repeatedly shown not to be effective,” yet remains “deeply engrained in how we teach and train engineers, scientists and technologists to this day.”

The established alternative — two-way public engagement — works but does not scale. It is “messy and inefficient,” demands expert vulnerability, and typically reaches tens to hundreds of participants where a broadcast reaches tens of thousands. Andrew’s first move is a distinction inside the alternative: relationship-based communication typically uses relationships to bring about specific, predetermined outcomes (more trust in science, “right” health decisions); relational communication is broader — it draws on relationships to facilitate the flow of ideas so that participants can benefit from that flow on their own terms.

That distinction opens the category the argument is named for. Parasocial communication — built on the one-way-yet-felt connections audiences form with a communicator, a concept borrowed from Donald Horton and R. Richard Wohl’s 1956 paper on “para-social interaction” — is, he argues, the form of relational communication that escapes the scale trap: it “potentially has the reach of transactional forms of expert-public communication, and the impact of relationship-based communication and engagement.” The evidence is practitioner evidence: virologist Christian Drosten’s Das Coronavirus podcast, which purportedly drew over 41 million downloads in its first couple of months as Germans sought “a personal connection with someone they trusted, and not just facts”; Carl Sagan, Bill Nye, John and Hank Green, Alice Roberts.

The mechanism is permission-granting. Audiences connect with these communicators emotionally and personally, and the resulting parasocial relationships “effectively give them permission to talk about what they know.” Communication that looks one-way is, in substance, relational — the audience has extended an invitation, and the invitation, not the credential, is what lets complex ideas land.

The argument then explains its own suppression. Andrew parses why experts communicate into four porous categories — instruction, ego, impact, and empowerment. Expert circles typically assume instruction and impact as defaults; both are generally transactional, treating the communicator as secondary to the content. But relational communication only works if audiences connect with the communicator as a person — making the communicator part of the message. Academia reads that as ego: practitioners risk “being branded as self-promoting,” institutions withhold support, actively discourage the work, or mistake hard-won parasocial relationships for a broadcast channel that can be co-opted. Carl Sagan “was famously sidelined by academia for his public communication and engagement.” The Foresight Catalyst final report records the same force as lived experience: colleagues misread the work as “‘just media’ or even self-promotion, rather than scholarship in practice” (§5.2.3, 2025).

The essay is candid about its epistemic status: a Scopus search for “parasocial AND communication AND expert AND public*” returned exactly one record. The evidence is “anecdotal rather than systematic,” and whether parasocial communication can deliver empowerment at scale is a research agenda, not a settled result — which is itself part of the claim: a mode of communication this promising is nearly unstudied.

Finally, the relational/transactional lens is load-bearing well beyond communication theory. It became the axis of Andrew’s AI-email risk framework (2025-09-07), a 2×2 crossing relational/transactional context with one-to-one/one-to-many mode — which found that relational, one-to-one email is precisely where AI drafting is most corrosive, because organizations run on “relational connective tissue.” It recurs as Modem Futura’s cross-domain thesis — teaching “remains fundamentally relational,” with trust between instructor and student “the real infrastructure” (ep. 84, 2026); “Every business, it turns out, is still a human business” (ep. 88, 2026) — and as the closing lesson of AI and the Art of Being Human (Abbott & Maynard, 2025): “the power of the relational over the transactional.” And when Cambridge Dictionary made “parasocial” its 2025 Word of the Year in part for its darkest associations — unhealthy bonds with AI chatbots — Andrew held the line rather than retreating from the word: parasocial relationships, with people or with AI, can be healthy or unhealthy, and “the association between ‘parasocial’ and AI isn’t necessarily bad” (2025-11-19). The work, he argues, is learning what differentiates the two.

Lineage

In his own words

From Why parasocial communication around complex ideas is important – and why we need more of it (AI-readable mirror), 2025-05-25:

“The distinction is important as it opens the way to thinking about parasocial communication as a form of relational communication that is distinct from transactional or relationship-based approaches, and one that potentially has the reach of transactional forms of expert-public communication, and the impact of relationship-based communication and engagement.”

“Each of these has been able to connect with large audiences because people connect with them emotionally and personally. The parasocial relationships they establish with listeners, viewers, and readers, effectively give them permission to talk about what they know. And even though the communication may seem one-way, this permission-granting makes it far more nuanced and relational.”

From Parasocial Relationships: Problematic Practice or Public Promise? (AI-readable mirror), 2025-11-19:

“Here, I suggested that parasocial relationships developed through platforms like blogs, podcasts, and other forms of social media—I used the example of the Modem Futura podcast I co-host with Sean Leahy—present an emerging and powerful way for experts to have relevance and impact at scale.

This, I argued, is because these parasocial relationships can draw back the curtain on the process of creating new knowledge, and help people feel they are connected to discussions and discoveries they would usually be excluded from.

It’s a concept that I practice in my own work, and still stand by.”

Engagement and reception

Independent engagement specifically with this argument is thin on the record as of 2026-08-06. The framework entered the federal record in August 2025 via the Future Travel Foresight Catalyst final report (rosap.ntl.bts.gov/view/dot/91942) — a published federal document, though authored by Maynard and Leahy themselves. Cambridge Dictionary’s selection of “parasocial” as its 2025 Word of the Year (November 2025) is independent evidence of the concept’s public salience, but it engaged the word — largely negatively, via concerns over AI chatbot relationships — not the initiative’s argument; Andrew’s 2025-11-19 post is the response. We know of no published independent evaluation of, or scholarly reply to, the parasocial-communication thesis itself; the essay’s own Scopus analysis (2025-05-25) suggests why the field it addresses is nearly empty. For the initiative-wide reception record, see Reception.

Where to go deeper