'The original influencer': Princess Diana and parasocial relationships
More than 26 years after her death, Princess Diana continues to loom large as a pop culture icon — even among a new generation who had yet to be born at the time of her passing. Yahoo Life’s Rebecca Corey explains the phenomenon of parasocial relationships and how, through movies and television series like The Crown, Princess Diana remains an influential figure.
Video Transcript
REBECCA COREY: So the idea of parasocial relationships gets brought up a lot with celebrities. It's this idea where you feel like you know someone, where you feel like you have a relationship with someone simply because you consume a lot of content about them. And Princess Diana was an object of fascination for so many people during her lifetime.
One media psychologist I spoke with described Diana as, quote, "The original influencer." Before the internet or social media was even a thing, she was on the cover of every magazine, constantly on the news. You couldn't avoid her. She was everywhere.
People started to fall in love with not just her, but the image of her that the media had created, which was somebody that people felt like they knew. She talked about things like mental health, body image, her husband's affair. A lot of things that a lot of people, but women in particular, were really able to relate to. And now decades later after her tragic death in a car accident in Paris, she continues to fascinate people who weren't even alive when she was alive. Who have only been introduced to her through the media, through images, through television series.
And a lot of young people see her as this almost hero figure. And it's a mythical hero, because this person that a lot of people feel like they know is actually a character or it's an image created by other people, by the media, by filmmakers, by documentarians. But in that regard, it doesn't matter that she died years ago, because that image, that character continues to live on so people can still feel like they know that character.
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