CONTEST

The long-standing explanation that parasocial feeling is a projection - people attach to a figure because the figure is available to be shaped by whoever is looking.

The name itself. Coined to describe the way viewers responded to a television character they followed consistently - a bond with somebody who did not know they existed. Parasocial: one-sided, parallel to the para- in paranormal.

A clinical name for a case where a one-sided bond is causing significant distress or impairment. Named in the eighties, and it is a real diagnosis for a small number of people.

The question underneath all of it, and the reason the clinical literature went in circles for forty years: is a parasocial bond a form of wellbeing, a substitute for it, or neither?

Persistent text spaces with per-topic cultures, norms enforced by social pressure and volume.

The jump from disliking a fictional portrayal to locating and publishing a real person's address. The word had to be invented for a grievance that used to be settled by writing a letter.

A disagreement conducted entirely in good faith about a person none of the participants have met, using the vocabulary of a personal grievance.

Enforcement by volume: a position is declared untenable, a pile of people makes it so, and the outcome is a fact nobody chose.

The only intervention on this site that you do to yourself, and the only one nobody else can do for you. List your five strongest one-sided ties, score joy and cost, keep three, mute one, trade one hour a week toward a person in the room.

The public performance of being at war with somebody, in public, for an audience, in a thread that never closes.

Framing online harassment as a mob, and asking who is on it.

Coordinated harassment of women in games, disguised as a debate about whether harassment should be allowed.

A mass coordinated response in which the metric being weaponised is attention rather than truth.

Public argument about ranking, and the discovery that the ranking was a product decision made by people with objectives.

Organised refusal to engage with a person, usually a public figure, over something they said or did.

A season of a reality format and a global sporting event produce millions of viewers who then investigate the participants' personal lives. A relationship with an edited construct becomes a licence to intervene in a real life.