As digital technologies increasingly shape everyday life, parasocial interaction and relationships have become central to many people's lives. From social media to subscription platforms like OnlyFans, from dating apps to AI companions, the social self is reorganized into asymmetrical, half- and one-sided formats that offer immediate convenience at the cost of shifting principles of social mechanisms and social organizing. While causality has yet to be shown, at the same time, increasing individualization, loneliness, and experiences of an alienated state of living in disconnection from the body and the world are already traceable.

Based on a multi-method research program, including interviews, surveys, experimental and observational studies, and digital ethnographies, the study presents an integrative concept of the shaping of the parasocial self, depicting how parasocial mechanisms are integrated into everyday life to fulfil social needs, address emotions, regulate, and construct identity. Parasocial forms of interaction are shown to offer immediate gratification and convenience, yet reveal ambivalences: from dating app fatigue and AI-induced emotional investment to relational dissonance in partnerships and affective dependency on mediated others.

The findings are presented as an integrative conceptualization of parasociality, and the graduated becoming of the parasocial self as a constitutive condition of subjectivity in neoliberal digital societies, serving effective push- and pullfactors. The concept of the parasocial self is discussed in terms of mechanisms and meanings, epistemic hierarchies, and broader modifications of sociality, depicting how subjects are both a product and a producer of parasociality, caught between agency and subjugation to algorithmic control.