ABSTRACT
Horton and Wohl (1956) first described the idea of a kind offace-to-face interaction between the performer and the audience member as parasocial interaction. They borrowed Kenneth Burke's (1937) phrase "coaching of attitudes" to explain that through various televisual techniques, television audiences are encouraged to feel as if they are a part of the world taking place on their television screens. The television persona is relatively consistent and stable from episode to episode, and audiences quickly form attitudes about particular television personalities via a form of Burke's (1950) "collaborative expectancy" (p. 58). The audience must accept the explicit and implicit terms of the program and must be able to "play the part" that those terms require. Such interaction has been extended to television because the brain tends to process media experiences as though the interactions were with real people (Kanazawa, 2002; Reeves & Nass, 1996).
