An event or moment · 1940 · First contact
The bobby-soxers
Teenagers organised in public, in letterpress newsletters, to buy records and argue about a singer. A press of ten thousand.
The first parasocial mass movement with its own publishing, its own jargon and its own antagonism toward the parents of the people in it. Everything since is a re-skin.
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.
Where it sits
1900 1900-1949 · 1940 1949
Provenance · 1 source record(s)
- retrievableThe teenage 'bobby-soxer', a term from the 1940s, and the scream that made one - the press turned a sound at a Sinatra performance into a generational diagnosis of mass hysteria. The first recorded audience parasocial eventBobby-soxer (Wikipedia). ↗
INSTITUTION The fandom as institution
Connected · 3 out, 3 in
Wishful thinkingdepicts · 1940 · A term or conceptElvis Presleycame before · 1956 · A personThe first fansof the same time as · 1924 · An event or momentBeatlesmaniacame after · 1964 · An event or momentEntitled to the adulation of all lesser mortalsof the same time as · 1940 · A mechanism or tacticThis is Londonof the same time as · 1940 · A person
It sits in