As an example of the ethically complicated nature of parasocial relationships, let’s consider the case of Fred Rogers [f36], who hosted a children’s television program from 1968 to 2001. In his television program, Mr. Rogers wanted all children to feel cared for and loved. To do this, he intentionally fostered a parasocial relationship with the children in his audience (he called them his “television friends”):

Movieclips. The Social Network (2010) - A Billion Dollars Scene (6/10). April 2017. URL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k5fJmkv02is (visited on 2023-11-24).

In the mid-1990s, some internet users started manually adding regular updates to the top of their personal websites (leaving the old posts below), using their sites as an online diary, or a (web) log of their thoughts. In 1998/1999, several web platforms were launched to make it easy for people to make and run blogs (e.g., LiveJournal and Blogger.com). With these blog hosting sites, it was much simpler to type up and publish a new blog entry, and others visiting your blog could subscribe to get updates whenever you posted a new post, and they could leave a comment on any of the posts.

Shannon Bond. Twitter takes Elon Musk to court, accusing him of bad faith and hypocrisy. NPR, July 2022. URL: https://www.npr.org/transcripts/1111032233 (visited on 2023-11-24).

In most cases, after the initial data representation is created, the computer runs a compression algorithm, which takes the image, sound, or video, and finds a way of storing it in much less computer memory, often losing some of the quality when doing so.

https://www.socialwick.com (visited on 2023-12-02).

We also would like to point out that there are fake bots as well, that is real people pretending their work is the result of a Bot. For example, TikTok user Curt Skelton posted a video claiming that he was actually an AI-generated / deepfake character:

What financial motivations does Twitter have? How does that influence Twitter’s design?

“Tsze-kung asked, saying, ‘Is there one word which may serve as a rule of practice for all one’s life?’ The Master said, ‘Is not reciprocity such a word? What you do not want done to yourself, do not do to others.’” Confucius, Analects 15.23 [b9] (~500 BCE China)

Nihilism# Sources [b86] [b87] [b88] [b89] There is no right or wrong. Nothing matters. There are many different types of moral nihilism. But they all boil down, one way or another, to the idea that moral reasoning or trying to think about ethics is not real, or is based on a mistake. Even if one is inclined towards nihilism, there is still truth in the anthropological observation that people do deliberate about how to act and how to live, and that these deliberations consistently take the shape of one or more of the ethical frameworks above, considering principles, character, virtues, consequences, responsibilities, and so on. So it is still interesting to look at ethics, even if you like the idea of nihilism.