An event or moment · 1993 · Television
Saturday morning cartoons
A scheduled block, a fixed slot, a face, a voice, a house, a family, and a writer who knows your name. Aimed deliberately at a person old enough to believe all of it, and running on a rhythm.
The clearest parasocial laboratory ever built, and nobody had to design a mechanism because the format is one. A generation went fluent in the vocabulary of attachment here and then explained the internet's emotional economics to people confused by it, and the usual claim - that the internet is making people parasocial - has the timeline exactly backwards.
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