Our parasocial relationships have gone too far: On Travis Kelce, social media diagnosing and more
Reminder: You do not know celebrities (or people on the Internet).
Scrolling through TikTok today — an action that becomes increasingly stress-inducing and unfun — I was absolutely gobsmacked by a video made about two members of the Kansas City Chiefs.
I won’t share the video here because I believe it to be so outlandishly foolish and irresponsible.
In it, a white woman — who starts the video stating she probably shouldn’t even be recording the video anyway and does not provide any credentials that might lend her forthcoming points credence — claims (essentially) the following things:
KC head coach Andy Reid turning a blind eye to mental health and substance abuse issues, citing one of his son’s suicides and his others’ well-documented car crash that severely injured a young child.
KC tight end Travis Kelce of having a substance abuse problem for being drunk at the Super Bowl parade and accusing him of not having been able to help victims of the horrible mass shooting that occurred at the end of the parade because he was so drunk (which has not been reported and this person would have no way of knowing.)
And there’s a bunch of other BS in there that wasn’t even worth drawing out.
Here’s a quick tip: Unless you’ve met someone in person (and even that is probably too minimal a bar), YOU DON’T KNOW THEM!
We don’t know people we perceive primarily through social media/general media. Those are parasocial relationships (a relationship that a person imagines having with another person whom they do not actually know), not real ones that allow us to know REAL things about people.
In the past two weeks, off the top of my head, I’ve seen Taylor Swift accused of having a substance abuse problem for drinking at the Grammys after party, Kelce accused of being an abuser for bumping into and yelling at Andy Reid during the Super Bowl and Kelce be accused, as I’ve just mentioned, of having a substance abuse problem for being sloshed during the Super Bowl parade in Kansas City.
I’m not here to say that getting trashed in public should be something we all aspire to every day. And, as someone who has been significantly drunk before (like most people have experienced at least once), I’m sure Kelce was not feeling too hot the morning after.
But to take a glimpse into a singular moment, or even a small sample of moments if we’d like to include the Super Bowl after party, that is considered a special, celebratory event via social media and decide to “diagnose” someone with a mental/emotional/physical ailment is irresponsible and absurd.
Again: WE DON’T KNOW THESE PEOPLE!
I’m not qualified to give you all a definition of substance abuse or explain whether Kelce’s behavior with Reid and beyond should be considered a red flag.
So I turned to my good friend Kaleigh Feldkamp, a licensed master social worker (official title), who offered the following thoughts:
“I honestly do not think it is a bad thing for society to be more cognizant and aware of things like substance abuse or aggression — I think Gen Z in particular is doing a lot of re-examining of things that previously were seen as the norm such as the general public’s relationship with alcohol and male aggression/aggression in sports…. However, these types of conversations require a level of nuance and care that is simply not really possible to have over social media. We have gotten into the habit of casually diagnosing people over social media which is extremely dangerous considering the stigma a lot of mental and substance abuse issues still carry.”
Which brings me around to another part of this video, and other similar ones I’ve seen recently, that angered me: There are so many more legitimate violence and health issues in sports — and specifically the NFL! — that deserve this kind of attention instead of making up or overplaying illegitimate issues.
According to New York Times reporting, at least one peer-reviewed study proved that, of the 117 NFL players arrested between 2000-2019 for an act of violence against women, “a player’s worth on the field… more strongly [predicted] how long his career will be than whether he is accused of violence against women” (Vrentas, NYT, 2022).
There are many cases of women actually sharing their stories of domestic and sexual violence at the hands of NFL players and other athletes. There are also many cases of NFL players and other athletes struggling with real substance abuse problems addressed by themselves or their teams.
But instead of focusing on bringing light to actual, legitimate issues that players and those that DO know them have raised, people on social media would rather manufacture issues from 30-second clips and out-of-context moments.
I’m not surprised. I’m just disappointed. And frustrated.
(On a separate note, this kind of feeds in to why I despise the “Why is no one talking about this?” and self-proclaimed “journalist” era of social media and the Internet. Our media literacy is so, so bad.)
Another of Feldkamp’s thoughts:
“No, I don’t think Travis Kelce is an abuser and I don’t think what he did to Andy Reid was abuse. However I really, really did not like the way people were talking about it, specifically the reasons people were using to explain why they didn’t think it was a big deal. It is an incredibly slippery slope from ‘Oh, he just did it because it was in the heat of the moment during the game’ to ‘Oh, he only hit her because he was in the heat of the moment watching the game.’”
It’s worth noting that Jason Kelce admonished his brother’s behavior on Wednesday’s episode of New Heights, the Kelce brothers’ podcast, and Travis himself also acknowledged the situation was not handled well and that he and Reid spoke about it.
The behavior didn’t go ignored and was worthy of some discourse — though not to the level it grew to.
I’m sure there will be some conversation about the Super Bowl parade, both of Travis’ behavior and, unfortunately, the shooting, on the next episode.
I don’t think that parasocial relationships are inherently a bad thing. It’s okay to daydream about what dating the actor you just watched in a good TV show might be like, break down silly song lyrics (to a point) with context clues we have been given from the songwriter’s life or comment on our favorite athletes’ podcast how fun we think it would be to hang with him and his brother.
But say it with me, one last time: WE DON’T KNOW THESE PEOPLE!
Conflating the perceptions of people that social media and media in general have given us with how they are in real life is dangerous for all involved.
That extends beyond just larger-than-life public figures like Kelce and Swift. Parasocial relationships with influencers, even the “micro” ones, can grow dangerous, too.
No one, not even me, is 100% who they appear to be on social media. Everyone is putting on a front, whether they realize it or not, some are just putting up less of a front than others.
As was said in the groupchat I ran to after seeing the video that prompted this all: “Social media is a curse.”
Hopefully we can raise our children to have better relationships with it (and they people they view through it).