Someone traced modern stan behaviour back to experiments from fifty years ago
A long thread on the psychology of fan activity, and every branch of it points at the same postwar lab work.
note (lesser_p)Read →
The contrarian read
An economics think tank argues parasocial relationships are just imaginary friends for adults
AEI, on Farrah Fawcett posters in 1976. It is the least sympathetic framing of the week and the most useful one.
I am going to defend this one against its own author. The Farrah Fawcett poster panic of 1976 and this piece are the same document written twice, and the thing worth noticing is that neither of them can imagine that a relationship could be real without being a dysfunction. A person naming a dog in a bar is not a symptom. Sometimes a friendship with a fictional person is the only friendship on offer, and the correct response is not a correction.
Notice, name, choose. That's the whole method.
The clerk's shelf - how this got here first
ESSAY
The Binding of Margery Kempe ↗Medieval binding as performance of self. EGSA 2011. Free to read.Sources
Parasocial Relationships Are Just Imaginary Friends for Adults ↗
American Enterprise Institute · 24 SEP 2026
Where this sits in the encyclopedia
The ratioA mass coordinated response in which the metric being weaponised is attention rather than truth.Envy, relief, and the two feelings at onceEnvy of the object of the attachment and simultaneous relief that it is not actually being withheld from you - the emotional ambivalence that is…Dionne Warwick's fan mailShe received correspondence by the sackful and answered it by name, individually, for years. The closest thing the twentieth century produced to a…A glimpse mistaken for accessA season of a reality format and a global sporting event produce millions of viewers who then investigate the participants' personal lives. A…
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