The importance of our relationship with the artist’s biography is reaffirmed everywhere and all the time. Its signal quality is intimacy. The knowledge we have about celebrities makes us feel we know them. We feel we have the right to some intimate access to them. This feeling, I’ve observed, has only grown with time. Every year we are on the internet, we grow more enmeshed with public figures. The phrase “parasocial relationship” is a previously somewhat obscure sociological term that has been batted about the internet with greater and greater frequency—a spreading usage reflecting the
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