CONTEST

By 1917 nine out of ten men at a costume ball came as him, a hold-up man in Cincinnati borrowed his costume as a disguise, and in 1916 somebody was paging him in more than eight hundred hotels at the same moment. Later, fans sent letters with a doodle of his face where the address should have been. The likeness had stopped being a picture and started being an instruction.

The long-standing explanation that parasocial feeling is a projection - people attach to a figure because the figure is available to be shaped by whoever is looking.

A woman's misfortune told aloud, a crowd's reaction converted into a number, and the number chose her.

The name itself. Coined to describe the way viewers responded to a television character they followed consistently - a bond with somebody who did not know they existed. Parasocial: one-sided, parallel to the para- in paranormal.

A clinical name for a case where a one-sided bond is causing significant distress or impairment. Named in the eighties, and it is a real diagnosis for a small number of people.

A musical of Dickens' unfinished novel that stops where the novel stops and turns the cliffhanger over to the seats: the audience votes who murdered Edwin Drood, who the disguised Dick Datchery is and which two characters end up together, and the cast performs the chosen ending that night. The house was promised 1,200 possible endings and that it 'won't be rigged in any way'.

In September 1988 Batman's readers called a premium-rate number, fifty cents a call, to decide whether the Joker's beaten Robin lived or died. The poll ran for about a day and a half and came down to 72 votes: 5,343 killed him, 5,271 spared him, and the issue that revealed the verdict had been prepared both ways.

The question underneath all of it, and the reason the clinical literature went in circles for forty years: is a parasocial bond a form of wellbeing, a substitute for it, or neither?

In 1992 MTV's The Real World gave reality television its least-questioned convention: a person alone in a room, speaking to a camera about what everyone just saw. The confessional was adopted by Survivor, Big Brother and the Housewives, and it endures because it is an interview dressed as a private thought, in a public space everyone pretends is private.

Persistent text spaces with per-topic cultures, norms enforced by social pressure and volume.

Edgic - editing plus logic - is the practice of grading every contestant's screen presence week by week: a category (invisible, under the radar, middle of the road, complex personality, over the top), a tone and a visibility score, charted in public so a community can read what the production is doing and name the winner before the merge. It began on the Survivor Sucks forum during Survivor's fourth season in 2002.

The jump from disliking a fictional portrayal to locating and publishing a real person's address. The word had to be invented for a grievance that used to be settled by writing a letter.

A disagreement conducted entirely in good faith about a person none of the participants have met, using the vocabulary of a personal grievance.

Enforcement by volume: a position is declared untenable, a pile of people makes it so, and the outcome is a fact nobody chose.

The only intervention on this site that you do to yourself, and the only one nobody else can do for you. List your five strongest one-sided ties, score joy and cost, keep three, mute one, trade one hour a week toward a person in the room.

The public performance of being at war with somebody, in public, for an audience, in a thread that never closes.

Framing online harassment as a mob, and asking who is on it.

Coordinated harassment of women in games, disguised as a debate about whether harassment should be allowed.

A mass coordinated response in which the metric being weaponised is attention rather than truth.

Public argument about ranking, and the discovery that the ranking was a product decision made by people with objectives.

Organised refusal to engage with a person, usually a public figure, over something they said or did.

A season of a reality format and a global sporting event produce millions of viewers who then investigate the participants' personal lives. A relationship with an edited construct becomes a licence to intervene in a real life.