>>1337974>They are cute girls. Pretty obvious why this would happen.Well, no.
They're artificial, and everyone knows they are artificial. This places a certain irremovable distance between the vtuber and the person watching it.
This, to me, seems counterintuitive to the traditional parasocial model, where more perceived intimacy forms a stronger bond.
>I'm glad you see it this way rather than blaming the lonely people for "doing it to themselves". Where do you think this comes from, you think people are sad and lonely because they want to be? That's a ridiculous notion, isn't it?
I wouldn't say that any of this is new or unprecedented, consider Don Quixote. It's a 17th century satire of heroic romance novels of that same age. But while Cervantes anticipated that media has a detrimental effect on people and warps people's relations with one another and themselves, his interpretation of the effect of media on people is somewhat wrong. The real Don Quixote would just sit at home all day reading his knightly love stories, substituting them for his loveless and lonely life. Of course that wouldn't make for a good story, but the point is that these concerns already existed 400 years ago. The "problem" is at least 400 years old and it hasn't been solved, it just amplified itself through technology and capitalism.
Who made bank off books back in the 17th century? Barely anyone, while it was likely somewhat profitable, it doesn't compare to what is possible now and what was possible 70 years ago. Consider the radio, similar concerns have been raised over this, the radio was confronted with the concern that all people would do is sit at home and listen to the radio all day (which the housewives did, which made it an excellent vessel for distributing ideology, but that's a separate issue from what I am talking about here), then the television, same thing. People were concerned about people sitting at home all day watching TV.
As an aside, what's interesting is that it didn't happen to the cinema, at least not as much as those other things, likely because it was more exclusive and the primary concern was the threat it posed to the theater (which ended up not being real). Home video basically also didn't get caught up in these concerns.
Comic books did have this panic, though. It was essentially exactly Don Quixote as Cervantes wrote it.
Then video games and I think we're all familiar with that.
Now we have more or less arrived in the presence and things have gotten very muddied and very strange. There's 2 or 3 problem areas now, there's social media that is text-based (facebook and twitter) and there's social media that is based on parasociality (streaming, online video and podcast) and there's anti-social media (this website and others like it).
I feel bad that I went on this entire tirade on historical media hysteria, because I all I really have to say about solving the problem is:
It'll work out somehow, it has so far.
I sort of forgot what I wanted to talk about, but basically the reason why things are that way is that someone can make money.
