CREATOR

End the episode before the answer. Give the viewer a fixed slot, a daily rhythm, and a question with no resolution, and they will come back tomorrow at the same time for years.

Streaming video over a network, at first unbroadcast and unproduced, from a bedroom or a desk.

The 1990s extension to live people who respond in real time - streamers, hosts, people who read your comment. The bond is still fundamentally one-sided, but the other side can now hear you.

Uploads become trivially cheap and the audience begins to attach to individuals rather than channels.

Roughly half a billion phone numbers become dialable, a fan can in principle hear a recorded voice, and the novelty ringtone sells the idea that a performer can be present in a pocket for about four years.

A performer with no media infrastructure becomes a global star through a video-sharing platform alone.

The shift from selling things to selling attention, which means the commodity being bought is a person's feeling - and the seller is whoever is on the other end of it.

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

Streaming gets a category, a vocabulary, a schedule, and a professional class of people who stream full time.

The schedule goes from weekly to continuous and the bond loses its shape. A serial gives you a slot and a cliffhanger; an always-on feed has no slot and no gap to miss anybody in.

Sending a false emergency report to a real address to provoke an armed police response, because of a grievance about a streamer.

A wave of studies measuring parasocial relationships with YouTubers, livestreamers and vloggers rather than with television hosts.

A voice in your ear, unedited, twice a week, for years. The most parasocial habit in the English language and rarely discussed as such.

A live stream with a visible comment feed, where the creator can read the room while the room watches itself. The first mass parasocial environment where the one-sided bond visibly, continuously, acknowledges you.

A monthly payment that buys recognition, and a chat in which the size of that payment is the mechanism for being noticed. Gifting, tiers, emotes, raids.

A performer with an animated persona, a persistent character and an industry-standard model where the audience pays for the character's recognition.

A viewer who donated enough arrives at a creator's home believing he knows her, and the boundary is a news event.

A high-profile streaming collective, featuring several women who had left other setups, collapses publicly and in litigation.

A platform's largest creator is suspended and reinstated. The audience experiences it as something happening to a person they know.

A creator economy conference puts platform executives and working creators on one stage and turns away the audience that makes both possible.

Creator posts and viewer comments are built for the television set, putting a two-way channel on the biggest screen in the house.