RECIPROCITY — THE EXCEPTIONS
Exceptions
This site is named after one-sided attachment. A corpus about that subject that could not count its own exceptions would not be measuring the thing it is named after. So here they are, including the two ways the count is probably wrong.
The other 245
are unlabelled on purpose. directed is the default condition of
everything collected here, and marking all of them would bury the ones worth
naming. An earlier draft of this page was going to be a three-bar chart; it was
measured first, and the chart read as an axis that was mostly unclassified
rather than one that is deliberately sparse.
3 reciprocated
The other end would be missed if it stopped. These three sit 17,020 years apart — The dog -15000 · Dionne Warwick's fan mail 1963 · Kobe Bryant 2020 — which is the argument for the whole site in one line. The exceptions are not a modern artifact.
5 simulated
Reciprocity manufactured on one side and sold as the product. They arrive in exactly two clusters: Somebody always wrote back 1930 · Entitled to the adulation of all lesser mortals 1940 · Registered by the applause meter 1945 · Live chat, two-way 2015 · The subscription tier 2015. Three in fifteen years, two in a single year, and 70 years with nothing in between.
We do not know why, and we are not going to guess. It may be a real feature of how mediated audiences work. It may be that a century of entries has never been checked against this axis at all. We think it is the second one, and the next paragraph is the evidence rather than the assurance.
The admission
8 of these 10 carry no
value on the otherness axis either. Only 2 do.
The reciprocity and otherness axes were filled independently and have largely
not been reconciled with each other — so the silence above is at least as
likely to be our bookkeeping as it is to be a feature of the world. We would
rather say that here than let a clean-looking chart imply we know.
Where the exceptions are not
7
of our 15 media hold at least one. The other
8 hold none: ai, games, music, stage, television_scripted, television_unscripted, theology, visual_art. Artificial intelligence has
twenty entries and not one exception on this axis.