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.
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
1950 1950-1999 · 1993 1999
Provenance · 1 source record(s)
- retrievableA whole genre organised around a weekly slot and a captive child audience, and then dismantled by a regulatory decision: children's programming was treated differently from adult broadcasting, so when networks moved their cartoons to weekday mornings the entire appointment-viewing culture went with themSaturday morning cartoon (Wikipedia). ↗
Connected · 3 out, 4 in
It sits in