A mechanism or tactic · 1438 · Medieval
Binding
Performing a self until the self holds, where it can be witnessed. Margery Kempe in white clothes in a world where widows wore black, weeping loudly in public for years, having decided she was going to be a specific kind of person.
The founding document. It has three ingredients - a public, a performance, and witnesses who disapprove - and every parasocial dynamic since has those three. The neighbours thought she was unwell. The only thing that has changed is what the audience thinks about the person who is unwell.
Application. One-sided attachment put to work on purpose. Creator economies, community, fandom as infrastructure, and the things that genuinely help people. Not automatically good - a tool with an obvious use is a tool that will also get a bad one.
Consideration. The part where somebody stops and thinks. The research, the diagnosis, the ethics, the lawsuits, the regulators. Roughly fifty years of arguing with itself about whether this is a relationship.
Where it sits
1000 1000-1499 · 1438 1499
Provenance · 1 source record(s)
- unverifiedNo specific claim is recorded against this source. The record is a pointer to the work in general; the entry's own prose is the argument and is not sourced line by line.Kempe, M. The Book of Margery Kempe
Connected · 2 out, 0 in
Reported as a story
It sits in