WORLD

Myths are not stories people tell once. They are stories with a fixed shape that get told to the same audience on a schedule.

A regular assembled audience for a figure who addresses them, in a building, on a schedule, for years.

A person who hears the specifics, performs the ritual, and knows the family history, on a repeating cycle.

A room of people responding to a performance, learning the timing of the person on the stage.

Guru devotion asks a disciple to hold one teacher in mind without pause - moving, walking, sleeping, sitting, happy or miserable - and the Tibetan tradition makes it indispensable to the path rather than optional. The Gelug-pa school's principal guru-puja was compiled in the mid-seventeenth century, which is the date this entry carries; the practice it regularises is older than the book.

Supporting a club as a condition of belonging to a place, a class, a family, or a city.

An adult with authority over a child for years, who is remembered partly by how they made them feel at nine.

A player who has been attached to for years leaves, and the grievance is felt as betrayal by the entire locality.

An Italian workman walked out of the Louvre with the painting under his coat, and the wall it had hung on went on drawing a crowd: four iron hooks, no picture, and thousands of people come to look at the hooks anyway. The papers printed the absence, and when she came back she had become public property - the first mass art icon, made by a thief rather than by a painter.

Support for a team or an athlete as a bond with a person, a place and a lineage, frequently inherited from a parent.

Two white broadcasters voiced two fictional black men from March 1928, and at its peak about forty million listeners a night followed their fortunes - half the nation's radios, by one estimate. The audience the show loved most was also the one it caricatured, and from 1931 that audience organised.

Broadcast drama on a fixed daily slot, written for an audience with nowhere else to be at that hour.

Franklin Roosevelt talked to the radio as if the listener were already in the room, and he did it often enough between March 1933 and June 1944 that the habit became a form - one he did not name. There is no solid definition of what counted as a chat; the estimates run from twenty-seven to thirty-one. The count does not matter. The sitting next to a fireplace does.

A form built almost entirely by women, for women, and treated as unserious for fifty years. Daily episodes, fixed slots, cliffhangers, characters written in indefinitely and never resolved.

Orson Welles presented a novel as a news bulletin on 30 October 1938, and CBS identified it as a dramatic performance four times during the hour. An estimated nine to twelve million Americans heard it, and at least a million of them were scared into some sort of action. By the next morning the newspapers had a story about the listeners, which is the one that has been retold ever since.

Fans gather, in costume, in a hotel ballroom, to be in the same room with people who feel the same way about a show.

Fan conventions as a permanent global circuit, with panels, dealers rooms, cosplay and a trade layer.

Launched as a small London stage musical in 1973, filmed in 1975, and from 1976 screened at midnight before a room that shouted back: The Rocky Horror Picture Show ran while its audience performed it, wearing the costumes, speaking the lines, improvising replies. The screen never answered a single shout. The room was the show.

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'.

Japanese animation and comics reach a large Western audience through dedicated channels, and a transnational fandom forms around them.

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

Fans organising across national borders around media, with a shared calendar of releases and a shared language.

A persistent virtual world with avatars, economies, and relationships between people who never met.

Prestige television as a sustained parasocial bargain: writers, actors and marketing presenting themselves as authors of a world viewers inhabit.

Public mourning for an athlete that drew on the athlete's own stated bond with a young fan.

A soap opera ends after decades and national broadcast schedules were rearranged around it.