Oddly enough, at the HS teaching level, this term had a significant boost within my Journalism classes in early 2024. Continued within a new course I started teaching Sept 2024, AI and Ethics. It was purely based around fandom - often for musicians, certainly Taylor Swift and her constant mastery of parasocial brand marketing (at least the argument then was mastery, before Showgirl and what seems like the most widespread negativity I've seen towards Taylor Swift ever at the HS level)
Also, continued discourse about the possibilities of anyone in 2025 or later being able to create and sustain a brand as Swift's team has done through pretty much the lifetime of my students last year.
But parasocial without an actual person on the other end of the medium? Just electricity? Disembodied language? Or even LLM's within physical AI, like an Optimus robot?
Your original argument was and is fine. Thank you for writing and sharing it!
All these end-of-year pop-linguistic selections are 2010's attention economy holdovers, even feeling slightly like the last efforts push to grab attention through browsers before SLM's become the heartbeat of people's daily knowledge...or at least that's an effort the tech sector would like to see happen.
Looking forward to these larger shared experiences of phenomenology, cybernetics, embodiment leading hopefully to better shared experiences daily across society, too.
Oddly enough, at the HS teaching level, this term had a significant boost within my Journalism classes in early 2024. Continued within a new course I started teaching Sept 2024, AI and Ethics. It was purely based around fandom - often for musicians, certainly Taylor Swift and her constant mastery of parasocial brand marketing (at least the argument then was mastery, before Showgirl and what seems like the most widespread negativity I've seen towards Taylor Swift ever at the HS level)
Also, continued discourse about the possibilities of anyone in 2025 or later being able to create and sustain a brand as Swift's team has done through pretty much the lifetime of my students last year.
But parasocial without an actual person on the other end of the medium? Just electricity? Disembodied language? Or even LLM's within physical AI, like an Optimus robot?
Your original argument was and is fine. Thank you for writing and sharing it!
All these end-of-year pop-linguistic selections are 2010's attention economy holdovers, even feeling slightly like the last efforts push to grab attention through browsers before SLM's become the heartbeat of people's daily knowledge...or at least that's an effort the tech sector would like to see happen.
Looking forward to these larger shared experiences of phenomenology, cybernetics, embodiment leading hopefully to better shared experiences daily across society, too.
Thanks Scott - and appreciate the HS context!