The Instrumental Sense: A Netnographic Framework for Understanding Digital Companionship
Resumo
Large Language Models (LLMs) have become increasingly prevalent in text and speech-based interactive systems, enabling more natural interactions that foster the formation of human-AI bonds. Competing frameworks have arisen to attempt to characterize these complex interactions and relationships that users develop with AI systems. This work examines leading explanations for human-AI companionship through a netnographic analysis of online user communities and proposes a taxonomy to identify key similarities among these explanations and to demonstrate how design choices and market forces are shaping the nature of human-AI relationships.
Referências
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Pan Wang, Professor Sohail Chaudhry, P. L. L. P., Nolin, J., and Olson, N. (2016). The internet of things and convenience. Internet Research, 26(2):360–376.
Patel, R. (2024). An expanded partnership with reddit. [link]. last access: 02/19/26.
Qi, T., Liu, H., and Huang, Z. (2025). An assistant or a friend? the role of parasocial relationship of human-computer interaction. Computers in Human Behavior, 167:108625.
Rasmussen, L. L. (2018). Parasocial interaction in the digital age: An examination of relationship building and the effectiveness of youtube celebrities. Social media and society, 7:280–294.
Rath, E., Armstrong, S., and Gorman, R. (2025). AI chaperones are (really) all you need to prevent parasocial relationships with chatbots. Version Number: 5.
Reddit (2025). Reddit audience insights. [link]. last access: 02/27/26.
Scott Hansen, S. Public AI imaginaries: How the debate on artificial intelligence was covered in danish newspapers and magazines 1956–2021. 43(1):56–78.
Shewale, R. (2025). Number of discord users: Demographics and trends (2025). [link]. last access: 02/27/26.
Turkle, S. (2011). Alone together: why we expect more from technology and less from each other. Basic Books.
Valtysson, B. Access culture: Web 2.0 and cultural participation. 16(2):200–214.
Warschauer, M. and Grimes, D. AUDIENCE, AUTHORSHIP, AND ARTIFACT: THE EMERGENT SEMIOTICS OF WEB 2.0. 27:1–23.
Zhang, R., Li, H., Meng, H., Zhan, J., Gan, H., and Lee, Y.-C. (2025). The dark side of ai companionship: A taxonomy of harmful algorithmic behaviors in human-ai relationships.
Banks, J. (2024). Deletion, departure, death: Experiences of ai companion loss. Journal of Social and Personal Relationships, 41(12):3547–3572.
Bingham, F. (2025). Italy’s dpa reaffirms ban on replika over ai and children’s privacy concerns. [link]. last access: 02/20/26.
Brandtzaeg, P. B., Skjuve, M., and Følstad, A. (2022). My ai friend: How users of a social chatbot understand their human–ai friendship. Human Communication Research, 48(3):404–429.
Costello, L., McDermott, M.-L., and Wallace, R. (2017). Netnography: Range of practices, misperceptions, and missed opportunities. International Journal of Qualitative Methods, 16(1):1609406917700647.
Curry, D. (2026). Revenue and usage statistics. last access: 03/07/26.
Depounti, I., Saukko, P., and Natale, S. (2023). Ideal technologies, ideal women: Ai and gender imaginaries in redditors’ discussions on the replika bot girlfriend. Media, Culture & Society, 45(4):720–736.
Duffy, B. E., Ononye, A., and Sawey, M. (2024). The politics of vulnerability in the influencer economy. European Journal of Cultural Studies, 27(3):352–370.
European Data Protection Board (2025). Ai: the italian supervisory authority fines company behind chatbot “replika”. [link]. lastaccess : 02/20/26.
Felman, E., Kerridge, I., Vered, M., and Komesaroff, P. (2025). Reflections on the cloak of convenience. 22(3):601–610.
Gambino, A., Fox, J., and Ratan, R. Building a stronger CASA: Extending the computers are social actors paradigm. 1:71–86.
Garcia, M. (2025). Testimony of megan garcia before the united states senate committee on the judiciary subcommittee on crime and counterterrorism hearing on “examining the harm of ai chatbots”. [link] access: 02/23/26, Testimony to the US Senate.
Giertz, J. N. My friend, the content creator: Consequences of parasocial relationships for engagement in emerging social media.
Haraway, D. J. (2016). A cyborg manifesto: Science, technology, and socialist-feminism in the late twentieth century. In Manifestly Haraway. University of Minnesota Press.
Heyselaar, E. (2023). The CASA theory no longer applies to desktop computers. 13(1):19693.
Hill, K. (2025). She is in love with chatgpt. [link]. last access: 02/20/26.
Horton, D. and Wohl, R. R. (1956). Mass communication and para-social interaction. Psychiatry, 19(3):215–229. PMID: 13359569.
Huckins, G. (2025). Why gpt-4o’s sudden shutdown left people grieving. [link]. last access: 02/20/26.
Humphry, J. and Chesher, C. (2021). Preparing for smart voice assistants: Cultural histories and media innovations. New Media & Society, 23(7):1971–1988.
Kuenssberg, L. (2025). ’a predator in your home’: Mothers say chatbots encouraged their sons to kill themselves. [link]. last access: 02/20/26.
Lang, H., Klepsch, M., Nothdurft, F., Seufert, T., and Minker, W. (2013). Are computers still social actors? In CHI ’13 Extended Abstracts on Human Factors in Computing Systems, CHI EA ’13, page 859–864, New York, NY, USA. Association for Computing Machinery.
Latour, B. (1992). Where are the missing masses? the sociology of a few mundane artifacts. In Bijker, W. E. and Law, J., editors, Shaping Technology / Building Society: Studies in Sociotechnical Change, pages 225–258. The MIT Press, Cambridge/MA.
Li, M. and Suh, A. (2022). Anthropomorphism in ai-enabled technology: A literature review. Electronic Markets.
Liu, S. X., Shen, Q., and Hancock, J. (2021). Can a social robot be too warm or too competent? older chinese adults’ perceptions of social robots and vulnerabilities. Computers in Human Behavior, 125:106942.
Lombard, M. and Xu, K. (2021). Social responses to media technologies in the 21st century: The media are social actors paradigm. Human-Machine Communication, 2:29–55.
Lomborg, S. and Kapsch, P. H. (2020). Decoding algorithms. Media, Culture & Society, 42(5):745–761.
Maeda, T. and Quan-Haase, A. (2024). When human-AI interactions become parasocial: Agency and anthropomorphism in affective design. In The 2024 ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency, pages 1068–1077. ACM.
Maslej, N., Fattorini, L., Perrault, R., Gil, Y., Parli, V., Kariuki, N., Capstick, E., Reuel, A., Brynjolfsson, E., Etchemendy, J., Ligett, K., Lyons, T., Manyika, J., Niebles, J. C., Shoham, Y., Wald, R., Walsh, T., Hamrah, A., Santarlasci, L., Lotufo, J. B., Rome, A., Shi, A., and Oak, S. (2025). Artificial intelligence index report 2025.
Nass, C., Steuer, J., and Tauber, E. R. (1994). Computers are social actors. In Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, CHI ’94, page 72–78, New York, NY, USA. Association for Computing Machinery.
OpenAI (2024). Openai and reddit partnership. [link]. last access: 02/19/26.
Pan Wang, Professor Sohail Chaudhry, P. L. L. P., Nolin, J., and Olson, N. (2016). The internet of things and convenience. Internet Research, 26(2):360–376.
Patel, R. (2024). An expanded partnership with reddit. [link]. last access: 02/19/26.
Qi, T., Liu, H., and Huang, Z. (2025). An assistant or a friend? the role of parasocial relationship of human-computer interaction. Computers in Human Behavior, 167:108625.
Rasmussen, L. L. (2018). Parasocial interaction in the digital age: An examination of relationship building and the effectiveness of youtube celebrities. Social media and society, 7:280–294.
Rath, E., Armstrong, S., and Gorman, R. (2025). AI chaperones are (really) all you need to prevent parasocial relationships with chatbots. Version Number: 5.
Reddit (2025). Reddit audience insights. [link]. last access: 02/27/26.
Scott Hansen, S. Public AI imaginaries: How the debate on artificial intelligence was covered in danish newspapers and magazines 1956–2021. 43(1):56–78.
Shewale, R. (2025). Number of discord users: Demographics and trends (2025). [link]. last access: 02/27/26.
Turkle, S. (2011). Alone together: why we expect more from technology and less from each other. Basic Books.
Valtysson, B. Access culture: Web 2.0 and cultural participation. 16(2):200–214.
Warschauer, M. and Grimes, D. AUDIENCE, AUTHORSHIP, AND ARTIFACT: THE EMERGENT SEMIOTICS OF WEB 2.0. 27:1–23.
Zhang, R., Li, H., Meng, H., Zhan, J., Gan, H., and Lee, Y.-C. (2025). The dark side of ai companionship: A taxonomy of harmful algorithmic behaviors in human-ai relationships.
Publicado
06/05/2026
Como Citar
SOUTO, Gustavo Guimarães; MORIMOTO, Carlos Hitoshi.
The Instrumental Sense: A Netnographic Framework for Understanding Digital Companionship. In: CONFERÊNCIA LATINO-AMERICANA DE INTERAÇÃO HUMANO-COMPUTADOR (CLIHC), 12. , 2026, Aracaju/SE.
Anais [...].
Porto Alegre: Sociedade Brasileira de Computação,
2026
.
p. 91-105.
DOI: https://doi.org/10.5753/clihc.2026.20357.
