Every time someone says something like this, I can think of examples of every point just from the limited scope of my own life to the contrary, which from the frequency it happens I'm guessing indicates my experience isn't so unique and the world isn't this doom and gloom black and white world as described on the internet. People still meet serendipitously. People still go out. The golf club at my municipal course still throws out several tournaments a year with enough demand for like four each mens and womens handicap flights. Maybe the people alleging these things have to look inwardly and ask why they aren't themselves doing these things that can still be done today.

There is one: universities. They're just really expensive so you can't stay there for more than a few years, and people aren't properly advised of how important the opportunity is.

They did, but it turns out that people’s most common social activity/interest is sex-based.

Omegle wasn’t known for making BFFs.

Meetup is kind of like that. I use it for ongoing hiking clubs and book clubs and movie clubs.

Comically, Facebook sort of serves this way as well by brining together hiking clubs and d&d groups.

“Para-“ tends to mean “around” or “beside,” kind of in the sense of “close to" or "almost”--paraprofessional teachers or lawyers, paramilitary groups, parallel lines, parasitic symbiotes. In this specific context, American sociologists Donald Horton and Richard Wohl (1956) [0] coined the notion of “para-social" relations, in order to describe audience members’ intensifying, one-sided sensations-of-relationships with media characters as American-style mass media came into its own:

> The most remote and illustrious men are met as if they were in the circle of one's peers; the same is true of a character in a story who comes to life in these media in an especially vivid and arresting way. We propose to call this seeming face-to-face relationship between spectator and performer a para-social relationship.

They contrast para-social relations with face-to-face ones, which they call ortho-social:

> The crucial difference in experience obviously lies in the lack of effective reciprocity [...] To be sure, the audience is free to choose among the relationships offered, but it cannot create new ones. Whoever finds the experience unsatisfying has only the option to withdraw.

> ...the media present opportunities for the playing of roles to which the spectator has–or feels he has–a legitimate claim, but for which he finds no opportunity in his social environment. This function of the para-social then can properly be called compensatory, inasmuch as it provides the socially and psychologically isolated with a chance to enjoy the elixir of sociability.

It's a brisk accessible read, and spookily still relevant. Thanks for the impetus to dust it off :)

Anyway—in the 2010s, social scientists began to use the idea to think about the emerging class of even-more-intimate, confessional celebrities—like the Kardashians—as those celebrities started to use the socials ‘round the clock and to broadcast seemingly intimate, unguarded moments [1]. “Healthy” doesn’t seem to be the word the researchers and clinicians tend to choose...

[0] https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/00332747.1956.11...

[1] e.g. https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/lkcsb_research_all/7/

para- has a variety of meanings [0] depending on which word it’s used to form.

Parasocial itself means “one-sided” in a relationship [1].

0: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/para-#English

1: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/parasocial

It means that it shares some, but not all, aspects of a social relationship.

It's often applied to one-sided relationships with celebrities, where you feel a personal connection to them but they literally don't know you exist.