Intimacy at a Distance

The word arrived in 1956, describing daytime television. Everything since has been an argument about what it costs to be answered.

A course on the thought of Parasocial Attachment.

Course outline

1. The Insult Is Backwards — The word everyone uses online to mean "that relationship is fake" was coined by two sociologists who spent the paper arguing it is not fake. What they actually claimed, and why the misreading matters.
2. The Handshake — What the paid features actually sell, and the fully-worked Japanese idol apparatus the streaming economy imported to sell it. Plus the reason a gift stops being a gift the moment its return is priced.
3. Two Bodies — The persona and the human behind it, worked out via medieval legal theory, professional wrestling, and the one argument that dissolves the authenticity question instead of answering it.
4. The Church and the Army — Why a fandom is a group at all, why it turns on itself when the figure at the centre leaves, and the finding about who these attachments are for that reverses the story almost everyone arrives with.
5. The Spectator, Externalised — Adam Smith on why being observed is the good itself, what happens when the imagined spectator is replaced by a real and paying one, and the two things Aristotle says about friendship that cannot both…

Part of the Symposium course library.