parasocial
I learned today that this is Cambridge Dictionary’s Word of the Year 2025 and that a hyphenated form was coined by sociologists in the '50s:
Social scientists Donald Horton and R. Richard Wohl of the University of Chicago coined the term ‘para-social’ in their 1956 paper, “Mass Communication and Para-Social Interaction: Observations on Intimacy at a Distance”, in the academic journal Psychology: Interpersonal and Biological Processes. They describe how the mass media of the time gave viewers the illusion of having a face-to-face relationship with performers.
I think I first became aware of the word while reading an article that I mentioned in another topic.