Parasocial Climbing Culture

One-way friendships and cultural transformation

Here in the United Kingdom we recently celebrated the coronation of King Charles III. I spent the day of the coronation at the crag. While I was there a fellow climber I was chatting with confessed that he couldn’t understand what all the fuss was about. This person’s mother was a monarchist, super invested in the coronation, and very loyal to the royal family. “Crazy!”, he exclaimed, “why would you care so much about someone who doesn’t even know you exist?”. Not long after this he proceeded to regale his friends with an account of the ins-and-outs of a prominent female climbing YouTuber’s latest video.

Both the one-way relationship that his mother has with King Charles and the one-way relationship he has with the YouTuber are examples of parasocial relationships. These are:

One-sided relationships, where one person extends emotional energy, interest and time, and the other party, the persona, is completely unaware of the other's existence.¹

Before we proceed further, ask yourself the following question:

Do you spend a significant amount of your discretionary time watching videos of complete strangers climbing stuff?

If so, then you may have a parasocial relationship. Your parasocial relationship may be particularly strong if you:

• Compulsively refresh your subscriptions/feeds waiting for more content from the persona.

• Talk about the persona’s videos with your uninterested real life friends.

• Refer to climbing personas by their Christian names only and simply expect those around you to know who you’re talking about as if they were someone in your friend-group: “Yeah bro Emil posted this awesome video the other day where he…”

• Get extremely excited when one of the personas you follow has a cross-over appearance with personas from another channel.

• Spend time writing sycophantic comments on the persona’s social media pages.²

• Leap to the persona’s defence if someone says something critical about their content.

Emotional responses such as these might not be unreasonable. Unsurprisingly, interest in sports spectatorship predicts having parasocial relationships with athlete personas.³ Moreover, parasocial relationships can engender feelings of companionship with the persona, and sometimes also a sense of ‘community’ with others who also have parasocial relationships with the persona. A one-sided friendship might help a person better cope with the stresses, anxiety, dislocation and disenchantment of modern life.⁴ A person might also draw guidance and inspiration from the persona, and incorporate aspects of their personality into their own self-concept.⁵ Indeed, the benefits of parasocial relationships are largest for those of low self-esteem, who are less able to derive positive outcomes from real-life relationships.⁶ Similarly, single persons have more intense parasocial relationships with personas of the opposite sex, suggesting that parasocial relationships may help satisfy needs for intimacy.⁷

Taken together, parasocial relationships might well be a rational coping mechanism given the ecology of the modern world. However, problems arise when parasocial relationships become dysfunctional substitutes for normal real-life social participation. Parasocial relationships can lead to alienation and estrangement from real-life peers, and can become delusional if the one-sided nature of the relationship is forgotten.⁸ Indeed, energy and time expended on parasocial relationships may well have been better spent on forming and maintaining real-life (or two-way online) social relationships.

Mentors vs Influencers

Parasocial relationships can be contrasted with in-person real-life mentor-mentee relationships. While climbers who began their journeys in an era prior to the ubiquity of the commercial gym will likely have been initiated into the grand tradition by a parent or other mentor, the vast majority of people now starting to climb will have had no such torch-passing relationship. This is partly because commercial gyms are idiot-proofed such that little to no guidance is required to safely climb the pink one in the corner, and partly because mentorships are, rightly or wrongly, perceived as paternalistic and old-fashioned. Either way, there are not enough competent mentors to go around, and they are unlikely to be found in modern climbing gyms.

Nonetheless all human beings need models of desire. In other words, humans need to infer from other humans the things in life that are worth desiring. This process is called mimetic desire. Where people do not follow a benevolent real-life mentor they will instead follow someone else who they feel they can trust. All young people are now plugged into social media, and can readily find surrogate mentorship in the parasocial relationships they have with social media influencers. What those followers end up desiring, and therefore the lives they choose to live, depends on who they follow.

For illustrative purposes, let us imagine two individuals: John, the wizened climbing veteran of the old-school who offers to take you climbing outside and show you the ropes; and The Influencer, the online personality who provides climbing content for you to watch while you’re not out actually climbing. John and The Influencer face different incentives, they want different things from their followers and this causes them to exert different sorts of influence upon those followers. John and The Influencer also interact with their followers through different mediums.

Now imagine that you are a young, impressionable novice climber. As you read through the following sections, consider how your journey through climbing might differ if guided by John or by The Influencer?

Mentor as Guide

Real mentors like John want to have good climbing partners. He wants his climbing partners to be virtuous, strong, and competent. He is therefore motivated to get his mentees out there climbing with him and learning from him and from the rock. He wants his mentees to regularly and deliberately leave their comfort zone and thereby develop the character required to climb more challenging routes (and that is perhaps more fun to be around). He might therefore contend that the point of climbing intimidating geological features is to learn something from them. Grades compromise learning by motivating novices into climbing routes of styles that they are already good at. John is therefore incentivised to instil the idea that grades are primarily useful because they confer safety information and deemphasise the idea that grades be treated as ends in themselves. More generally, John might also think that the traditions he adheres to are valuable and that he has a responsibility to pass them on to the next generation.

Additionally, because John actually knows who you are, and interacts with you regularly in person, your relationship is two-way, and therefore he will empathise with you, look after you, and take pride in your successes — after all to some extent you are a reflection of him. At their best, real mentors like John encourage and guide their mentees towards self-actualisation; towards the complete realisation of their potential, as both climbers and as humans.

Seeing climbing as being fundamentally about learning, that it is a journey or quest which aims towards self-actualisation, is the characteristic component of a distinct philosophy of climbing, which for short we will call the old way.

Influencer as Guide

In contrast, what you are like as a person is of no concern to parasocial mentors like The Influencer because they have no idea who you are beyond your abstract role as a source of their views and revenue. What The Influencer wants is to have more people consuming his content, buying his products and signing up for his training plans. He can do this by cultivating parasocial relationships in his audience.⁹ This can be achieved by consistent content creation¹⁰, addressing the camera as if the audience were there during filming, adopting a conversational style¹¹, and by sharing intimate personal stories.¹² The Influencer may also exaggerate his prestige and expertise to increase the strength of their followers' parasocial relationships.¹³

However, being flagrantly self-serving reduces both perceptions of his authenticity and purchase intentions among his followers¹⁴, so The Influencer is incentivised to conceal this fact as much as is possible.¹⁵ However, as mentioned above, human beings do not autonomously produce their own desires but in fact copy them from others. As such, transmitting certain values to your audience will increase the likelihood of them buying your products or signing up for your training plans. Embodying and extolling "big number = good", data fetishist and materialist philosophies of climbing leads the audience to think that 1) the value of a human’s life boils down to the grades it has climbed; 2) that measuring and quantifying one’s body will help yield the next grade; and 3) that the shiny new training gadget will totally make a difference to your life. The trick is to tie the audience’s self-esteem to their numbers and then make them think about those numbers as often as possible. The result is more purchases and sign-ups as an audience of consumer-climbers clamours for the secret ingredient necessary to escape the prison of 'the plateau' and experience the ecstasy of the next number.

For this reason The Influencer has no incentive to discuss or engage with traditional philosophies of climbing.¹⁶ Indeed, the things which will actually improve a climber — i.e. getting out there and deliberately leaving one’s comfort zone — are not something that The Influencer is incentivised to promote. Quite the opposite, in fact, people out there actually climbing are not sitting at home consuming his online content or grinding away in a gym following the mass-produced training plan he sold to them.

In order to keep followers watching, The Influencer might also spew out ostensibly useful information, which is enthusiastically consumed by eager but naive followers: “the 10 most common mistakes climbers make”, “6 more advanced climbing tips”, et cetera. But information is not knowledge, and knowledge is not wisdom. Some things you can only learn by doing. Invaluable but intangible things, such as virtue, character, experience, and wisdom are impossible to quantify, measure, sell or communicate. Influencer-led novices are thus not encouraged into situations which yield these things, and consequently are increasingly unable to conceptualise how these things might be developed through climbing or how important they are to flourishing as a climber. These common-sense values simply fall by the wayside, are marginalised, then forgotten. Only the numbers, and the disembodied “tips” remain salient.

Due to The Influencer’s audience having an incomplete understanding of the richness and complexity of what it takes to be a good climber, and what good climbing is, the significance of ascents are framed by The Influencer as depending only on their most digestible element: the grades. Moreover, consumers prefer products with bigger numbers than smaller numbers¹⁷, so it pays to put grades front and centre and to make them as large as you possibly can. Grades are therefore presented not as a tool, but as primary reason for climbing in the first place. Once The Influencer inevitably has an audience of people who mainly understand things in terms of numbers it comes to shape the content that he creates and, with time, even what he himself thinks is valuable. This reinforcing cycle makes The Influencer become more number focussed himself and end up compromising his own style and experience for the sake of the big numbers. This could, for example, take the form of 3D-printing iconic boulder problems or top-roping climbs to death to ensure an ascent. Perhaps at its worst this cycle can culminate in The Influencer giving unjustifiably high grades to routes despite knowing that his peers will recognise what he has done.¹⁸ Besides, such action serves to further exaggreate his personal prestige in the eyes of his audience, in turn increasing the strength of his parasocial relationships.

Where grades are particularly hard to understand, because they attempt to communicate an irreducible phenomenological experience that can only possibly be understood by those who have been through such experiences, The Influencer is incentivised to attempt to make those grades more comprehensible to their audience. However, because The Influencer’s audience do not have the ability to even half-understand the experience represented by the grade, he is incentivised to reframe climbs in terms that their followers do understand and will therefore more readily give their attention to. The most recent iteration of this is deconstructing routes into fragments that uninitiated climbing novices are capable of understanding. Trad routes are thus crudely reimagined as sport routes, which in turn are crudely decomposed into boulder problems, which in turn are dismanteled such that each move is given its own grade.

© Ursus Wehrli

Rather than helping his followers to see the whole, the gestalt, the thing that is greater than the sum of its parts, The Influencer is instead incentivised to advocate that their followers perform a gestalt switch from global attention to local attention in the climbing domain. This idea is encapsulated in the idiom ‘you can’t see the forest for the trees’.¹⁹ Local attention is not our default way of attending to the world²⁰, it devitalises the world by blocking off our ability to appreciate context, process and meaning, and its inappropriate application is associated with numerous downsides for individual human beings, societies and the planet.²¹

More disturbingly, local attention risks being applied to the self. At worst an isolated parasocial follower may self-reconceptualise from being an irreducibly complex and infinitely valuable human person into being a mechanical assemblage of body parts whose essential attributes can be wholly represented by statistics (like a Top Trumps card). Quantified persons who are fixated on their metrics are much more willing to surrender attention and money to The Influencer if doing so promises to pump their numbers up.²²

The Influencer must consistently and perennially churn out the content in order to maintain his parasocial empire. Over time his authenticity and passion steadily evaporate. Eventually the climbing ceases to be the important thing that he records, it instead becomes the thing that he must do in order to record something. Climbing thus becomes instrumentalised: climbing is not the point, the point is the recording of the climbing. This too is transmitted to his audience and is imitated. At crags around the United Kingdom you will find solo amateur climbers setting up tripods and drones in order to record their ascents for their own social media accounts. For many getting ‘the send’ recorded on video often becomes more important than experiencing ‘the send’ itself. Indeed, the prevailing ethic is that “if it’s not on Instagram then it didn’t happen”. Precious attention is expended on setting up the camera, switching the camera on and off between attempts, and feeling self-conscious. What could otherwise have been a deep, mindful, meditative and contemplative climbing experience is compromised and rendered shallow by the instrumentalisation and re-representation of the climbing. The birds singing in the air, the sunlight dappling the leaves of the trees, and the beauty of the ancient rock are not valuable in and of themselves. Their value lies solely in the extra likes they will yield for the video.

Twilight of the Old Way

As we have seen, the values which real-life mentors and influencers are incentivised to extoll are different and contrasting. The beliefs, attitudes, goals, behaviours and journeys of a novice will thus differ, potentially radically, depending whose influence they come under. In other words, the culture and habitus of a novice depends on who their role models are.

Real mentors, while not going extinct, are not able to reach mass audiences. They will continue to pass their values and attitudes on to their small cadres of mentees as they always have. The problem is that such mentors are few and far between, with most new climbers lacking the guiding hand of a true mentor.²³ Many of these rudderless novices will inevitably find their way into the parasocial custody of the influencers. In contrast to mentors, influencers can reach many hundreds of thousands, if not millions of climbers and prospective climbers.

If a sufficiently high percentage of climbers in a society (perhaps as low as 10%) get their philosophies of climbing from parasocial mentors rather than real mentors, then social contagion will ensure that influencer values and norms will become dominant among younger cohorts and, over time, will become established as the national climbing culture. Even traditional forms of climbing media will start reflecting influencer values because that’s what the majority of potential readers and watchers understand. Cultural change also happens both according to a variation of Planck’s principle, i.e. culture changes one funeral at a time, and by influential institutions (such as UKClimbing and the British Mountaineering Council) becoming staffed by people with influencer-led philosophies and attitudes.

Those with old way philosophies of climbing are on the way to becoming a minority, and perhaps they are already. As a consequence, we are living through systematic change in the ideas that are transmitted, the practices that are endorsed, and the virtues and achievements that are valued and praised. Climbing is no longer widely considered to be primarily about learning, as being a pathway to physical, mental and spiritual development, and a joyous quest by which to discover the good things in life and the world. Climbing is now a game of getting the big numbers. Indeed, the notion that high numerical performance is not the be-all and end-all is incomprehensible to many young climbers. Holistic attitudes towards climbing, though once dominant, are now countercultural. In our parasocial climbing culture not having a social media account is punk, not wanting a training plan is dissident, and deliberately leaving one’s comfort zone is a radical act.

But hope is far from lost, the old way will continue to be passed down to (and perhaps be independently rediscovered by) those prepared to seek it. The crags will always be there for these people, and they shall continue to crack on, even as parasocial climbing culture marches onward into a shallow world of isolation, abstraction, fixation, replication, instrumentalisation, re-representation, deconstruction of rock climbs into ever smaller and smaller pieces, and, of course, ever more numbers.²⁴

1. Taken from: Kowert, R., & Daniel, E., Jr. (2021). The one-and-a-half sided parasocial relationship: The curious case of live streaming. In Computers in Human Behavior Reports (Vol. 4, p. 100150).

2. This can also be seen as an expression of great desire to move from a one-sided relationship to a one-and-a-half-sided relationship.

3. Sun, T., & Wu, G. (2012). Influence of personality traits on parasocial relationship with sports celebrities: A hierarchical approach. In Journal of Consumer Behaviour (Vol. 11, Issue 2, pp. 136–146).

4. MacNeill, A. L., & DiTommaso, E. (2023). Belongingness needs mediate the link between attachment anxiety and parasocial relationship strength. In Psychology of Popular Media (Vol. 12, Issue 2, pp. 242–247).

5. These examples taken from: Hoffner, C. A., & Bond, B. J. (2022). Parasocial relationships, social media, & well-being. In Current Opinion in Psychology (Vol. 45, p. 101306).

6. Derrick, J. L., Gabriel, S., & Tippin, B. (2008). Parasocial relationships and self-discrepancies: Faux relationships have benefits for low self-esteem individuals. In Personal Relationships (Vol. 15, Issue 2, pp. 261–280).

7. Greenwood, D. N., & Long, C. R. (2010). Attachment, Belongingness Needs, and Relationship Status Predict Imagined Intimacy With Media Figures. In Communication Research (Vol. 38, Issue 2, pp. 278–297).

Liebers, N. (2022). Unfulfilled romantic needs: Effects of relationship status, presence of romantic partners, and relationship satisfaction on romantic parasocial phenomena. In Psychology of Popular Media (Vol. 11, Issue 2, pp. 237–247).

8. Hartmann, T. (2016). Parasocial Interaction, Parasocial Relationships, and Well-Being. In L. Reinecke and M. B. Oliver (Eds.), The Routledge Handbook of Media Use and Well-Being. Routledge.

9. Aw, E. C.-X., & Chuah, S. H.-W. (2021). “Stop the unattainable ideal for an ordinary me!” fostering parasocial relationships with social media influencers: The role of self-discrepancy. In Journal of Business Research (Vol. 132, pp. 146–157).

Forster, R. T., Vendemia, M. A., Journeay, J. M., & Downey, S. E. (2022). Mixing Parasocial Friendship With Business. In Journal of Media Psychology.

Breves, P., Liebers, N., Motschenbacher, B., & Reus, L. (2021). Reducing Resistance: The Impact of Nonfollowers’ and Followers’ Parasocial Relationships with Social Media Influencers on Persuasive Resistance and Advertising Effectiveness. In Human Communication Research (Vol. 47, Issue 4, pp. 418–443).

10. Lather, J., & Moyer-Guse, E. (2011). How Do We React When Our Favorite Characters Are Taken Away? An Examination of a Temporary Parasocial Breakup. In Mass Communication and Society (Vol. 14, Issue 2, pp. 196–215).

11. Dibble, J. L., Hartmann, T., & Rosaen, S. F. (2015). Parasocial Interaction and Parasocial Relationship: Conceptual Clarification and a Critical Assessment of Measures. In Human Communication Research (Vol. 42, Issue 1, pp. 21–44).

12. Nah, H. S. (2022). The appeal of “real” in parasocial interaction: The effect of self-disclosure on message acceptance via perceived authenticity and liking. In Computers in Human Behavior (Vol. 134, p. 107330).

13. Aw, E. C.-X., Tan, G. W.-H., Chuah, S. H.-W., Ooi, K.-B., & Hajli, N. (2022). Be my friend! Cultivating parasocial relationships with social media influencers: findings from PLS-SEM and fsQCA. In Information Technology & People (Vol. 36, Issue 1, pp. 66–94).

14. Aw, E. C.-X., & Chuah, S. H.-W. (2021). “Stop the unattainable ideal for an ordinary me!” fostering parasocial relationships with social media influencers: The role of self-discrepancy. In Journal of Business Research (Vol. 132, pp. 146–157).

15. The illusion breaks-down when content creators say things like “I’ll post the new highly anticipated video when you get me 500,000 subscribers!” When creators say things like this they shatter the delusions of the subscriber. Suddenly, you realise that you do not live in the cosy imagined world where Adam Ondra is your special friend who lives inside your laptop. You are transported into cold hard reality by the sober sense that Ondra does not even know you exist. To him you are just one of many abstract numerical units that his manager wants him to care about.

16. There are exceptions to this of course. Certain influencers seem to understand their have a sort of noblesse oblige to fulfil certain social responsibilities and be good role models. For example, much of Dave Macleod’s YouTube content frequently extolls a philosophy of antifragility, an invaluable attitude towards life, which is in direct conflict with a “big number = good” philosophy that encourages climbers to physically train and use style-compromising tactics such that they never have to leave their comfort zone. Dave is not financially incentivised to do this, yet he presumably does so because he feels it is the right thing to do.

Other exceptions are professional climbers who clearly have old way philosophies of climbing. Their personal attitudes towards climbing inevitably mean they spend more time out climbing than churning out content. It is just less of a priority for them; the value derived from doing more climbing outweighs the monetary returns from spending time building a parasocial empire. Moreover, the impresiveness of such climbers’ achievements is sufficient to keep them financially afloat. In earlier times these climbers’ intrinsically motivated escapades made for good climbing films and so they would be over-represented in climbing media. However, in the present time it is those who are most willing to churn out the content, no matter how facile and inane, who generate the strongest and largest numbers of parasocial relationships. And probably make the most money.

17. Santana, S., Thomas, M., & Morwitz, V. G. (2020). The Role of Numbers in the Customer Journey. In Journal of Retailing (Vol. 96, Issue 1, pp. 138–154).

18. It is also true that professional climbers in desperate circumstances have been incentivised into lying about ascents. This is not discussed here because this practice does not seem to have worsened in the parasocial age. If anything, the now sadly widespread expectation that professional climbers must film their routes in order to believed may have led to fewer instances of lying. This new expectation is another example of social norms changing in response to technology shocks, in this case the fact that everyone now carries around mobile phones with cameras.

19. It pains me to use the American version of the idiom but it will lead to less confusion than saying ‘wood for the trees’.

20. Navon, D. (1977). Forest before trees: The precedence of global features in visual perception. In Cognitive Psychology (Vol. 9, Issue 3, pp. 353–383).

21. See also: McGilchrist, I. (2008). The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World. Yale University Press.

22. Jethani, S. (2021). The Politics and Possibilities of Self-Tracking Technology. Emerald Publishing Limited.

23. If you’re a new climber and can’t find a mentor then consider joining a climbing club or seeking out a traditionally-minded climbing coach. Alternatively, read old books about rock climbing and its philosophy. The attitudes, mindset and approach of even the Victorian mountaineers apply just as well today, even if technology has leapt forward.

24. I am grateful to fellow Substacker The Punter for articulating this optimistic outlook in a comment on a previous essay.