IDOL

Supporting a club as a condition of belonging to a place, a class, a family, or a city.

An adult with authority over a child for years, who is remembered partly by how they made them feel at nine.

A player who has been attached to for years leaves, and the grievance is felt as betrayal by the entire locality.

Support for a team or an athlete as a bond with a person, a place and a lineage, frequently inherited from a parent.

A physical object that had to be opened, a volume small enough for one person to hold, and a reply that was an exception. Clara Bow, Shirley Temple, Judy Garland, all had staff whose job was correspondence. Some of it came back.

The first documented fan clubs, organised around sheet music and radio rather than film. Following became joining.

Teenagers organised in public, in letterpress newsletters, to buy records and argue about a singer. A press of ten thousand.

The early frames on attraction to media figures, work that treated the person doing the gazing as a slightly odd specimen and the celebrity as an object of study rather than a participant.

A formal organisation with membership, dues, an elected president, a newsletter and rules. Not a spontaneous thing that happened to fans - a structure somebody built for them and that fans then ran themselves.

A national simultaneous viewing event, and an industry that learned within two years that the appeal was not the music.

A label, a songwriter and an image, assembled and launched. Not discovered - assembled.

Support for a politician structured as a personal bond rather than a policy preference, in a way that transfers poorly across candidates.

See 'Dionne Warwick's fan mail'. Kept as a case because it is the one documented example of a large parasocial arrangement that stayed reciprocal without being a parasocial relationship in the emotional sense.

She received correspondence by the sackful and answered it by name, individually, for years. The closest thing the twentieth century produced to a genuinely reciprocal parasocial relationship.

A global mass hysteria, documented live, with screaming, fainting, and an industry that began pricing it within months.

Research on why some political candidates reliably produce personal attachment and others do not, despite comparable policy positions.

Elvis Presley was filmed in a two-dimensional process that placed an apparently three-dimensional Elvis on stage, in a scene where real people were supposed to react to him. Aloha from Hawaii via Satellite reached an estimated half the planet.

A costume is put on by a new actor and the audience transfers its entire attachment to whoever is now inside it. Running five days a week, in front of millions of children, with nobody pretending otherwise.

A death broadcast in real time to a generation that had grown up with a songwriter's complaints as a soundtrack.

Bands assembled for a market, with fan clubs, fan voting, fan merchandise and fan-financed releases.

Organised, commercialised intrusion: tracking schedules, buying flight details, intercepting travel, surveilling buildings.

A person famous for being filmed, with no skill, no work and no release schedule - and an audience that formed anyway.

Public mourning in a way that produced its own genre of documentary and speculation.

The pattern of locating and publishing a private address over a disliked fictional portrayal.

Fans are injured or killed attempting to get closer to a performer, in volume, repeatedly, for years.

An actor's persona and a character's persona are widely treated as the same thing, and one retires while the other continues.

Paid message apps where a window shaped exactly like the one holding your best friend costs about four dollars a month per artist, plus anniversary counters that make the bond feel cumulative and streaks that convert it into a hostage situation.

A fan harmed in an attempt to breach a celebrity's home, and a petition that followed.

Organised conflict between fanbases, with brigading, ratioing and coalition behaviour, conducted with the grammar of war.

Evidence that the value of a celebrity endorsement falls when the audience suspects the relationship is a transaction.

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

A death announced through an initialism, and a global response before anybody knew the details.

Idol apps, paid messaging, fan-owned content, fan-voted releases, anniversary features, and a fandom documented and researched as a business model.

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

Fans of one artist are organised into mass harassment of another, using the first artist's parasocial bond as the weapon.

Envy of the object of the attachment and simultaneous relief that it is not actually being withheld from you - the emotional ambivalence that is present in almost every long-term fan relationship and rarely discussed.

A single artist booking a stadium for many consecutive nights, generating a physical economy around one very large parasocial bond.

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.