PARASOCIALIZE

Parasocialize.

You feel like you know somebody who has no idea you exist. Everybody has one. This is the news feed for that.

1956

The word. Horton and Wohl coined parasocial to describe television.

−70,000

The thing. Somebody carried their dead into a cave and set a stone under her head.

The top 8

Not one frame of these cartoons is freely licensed, so nothing above is a cartoon. What is up there is what the cartoons turned into instead — cosplay, a convention panel, a themed party, a coaster built out of Reptar — which is a longer way of saying the pictures are of the audience.

Read the whole list

One list so far: the top 8 parasocial moments in saturday morning cartoons of the 1990s.

Ten ways it shows up · one story from each

T IDOL

Taylor Swift's re-recordings are a parasocial business model

Every other artist is watching this and copying the tactic without copying the thing that made it work, which is…

6 more →
A CREATOR

A wellness podcast just became a television channel

A podcast host has spent years being told, gently, by a hostile business that podcasts are not television. And then…

6 more →
A CHARACTER

A clown got a prequel and four million households signed up without signing anything

A clown gets a prequel. That sentence is the entire essay, and I have written about this before and I…

2 more →
P COMPANION

Pygmalion: the Greek myth that predicted this whole thing

The Greeks had the whole thing two thousand years ago and did not think it needed a caveat, which tells…

9 more →
Y WORLD

YouTube is turning Shorts into episodic television

Shorts were supposed to be the snack. Instead somebody noticed that people want a story with a next part, and…

3 more →
T BRAND

The living room is now a comment section

The single weirdest thing about this is how small the change is and how complete. A person used to sit…

5 more →
A CROSSOVER

AOC and the parasocial nature of politics

This is the one nobody in this field covers, because it is unfashionable to admit that a politician occupies the…

2 more →
H CONTEST

House of the Dragon ended and the fans are furious at the show, not the characters

This is a fight about a story and it is being fought with the vocabulary of a parasocial grievance, which…

2 more →
W GRIEF

When a famous person dies it can feel like losing someone you loved

I want to push back on the word distress in every piece that runs this week, because it is doing…

12 more →
A DANGER

A fan was convicted of stalking Jungkook. Twenty-two visits. One hundred and thirty-three doorbell rings

I am not going to do the thing where I explain this away, and I notice that every parasocial site…

1 more →

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