Start with the plain observation, because everything else in this course is built on it. You can feel close to somebody who does not know you exist. Two media researchers, Horton and Wohl, working in the middle of the last century with television and radio, gave that its name: parasocial interaction. Their version, in ordinary words: you come to know a person through a screen or a speaker in the way you come to know anybody, through voice, face, repetition and small disclosures, and the knowing only travels one way. They were not diagnosing anybody. They were describing a feature of the medium, the way you would describe how sound behaves in a stone room. The insult was bolted on later, by the rest of us.

Here is the picture that usually does it. You take the same bus every morning and the same driver says good morning every morning, and after a year you know his voice, his moods, the way he taps the wheel at a long light. If he stopped turning up you would notice and you would wonder about him. He would not notice if you stopped turning up, because there are eighty other people on that bus and you are one of them. Now make the bus a phone, make the driver somebody talking into your ear for two hours a week about his own life, and make the year three years. The feeling gets much larger. The one-sidedness does not change at all.

The next point is the one worth actually believing rather than merely reading. This is not a malfunction. Your nervous system has spent a very long time learning to pull everything it can out of two signals, a face and a voice, because for most of human history those were how you knew whether you were safe and whose people you were among. A voice speaking quietly and warmly, at close range, without hurry, has always meant something specific and good. Put an earbud in and that exact signal arrives, produced deliberately, straight into the bones of your skull, with no room to check and no body to read against the words. There is no organ in the ear that checks credentials.

Which is why knowing all this changes remarkably little. People who study media effects for a living describe a presenter’s illness in the tone you would use about a cousin. Understanding a mechanism does not switch the mechanism off, any more than knowing about startle reflexes stops you jumping at a slammed door. That will keep coming up in this course, so it is worth setting down early: being able to name a thing accurately is a genuine skill, and it is not the same as standing outside the thing. If you have ever felt faintly stupid about how much a stranger’s voice means to you, you can put that down. Nothing foolish was happening. Ordinary mammal equipment was working correctly in conditions it has no way of detecting.

Now two terms that carry most of the weight in this course. Emotional objectification is treating a person as the thing that makes you feel a certain way. Not a thing you dislike. Usually a thing you like, which is exactly what makes it hard to catch. Think about a lamp. Nobody holds a grudge against a lamp, nobody wonders how the lamp’s week has been, and when the light does not come on the annoyance is about the light rather than about the lamp. Most of us have at least one person we flip on. Compression is what that does to somebody: a whole person squeezed down to the one part of them you use, the way you pack a small bag and leave the rest of a person on the bed.

With the people in your kitchen, compression is a failure of attention. The whole person is standing right there being inconvenient and slow and unflattering, and you could look. You have been given access to the boring parts and you compressed them anyway, because compressed people are easier to plan around and because attention is expensive and because you were tired. That version is repairable in the ordinary way. You look again. You ask something. The person, being present, corrects your picture of them by continuing to exist in front of you, which is a service the people in your life perform constantly and are never thanked for.

With somebody on a screen, and this is the claim the whole course grows out of, the compression is not a failure of attention. It is the format. You were never given the whole person, and there was no version of this in which looking harder would have shown you more. What reached you is an edit, and that word is meant in the least sinister sense available. Somebody chose which forty minutes of a long afternoon would exist. Somebody removed the stumble, the unkind remark that got thought better of, the dead air while a child was checked on. Somebody warmed the low end of a voice so it would seem closer than a voice at that distance has any business seeming. All of that is craft, and none of it is a crime.

Goffman, whose subject was how people manage the impression they make, gives us the vocabulary for what that does. He described a front stage, where the performance happens and the audience is accounted for, and a back stage, where you can be sloppy and unfinished. Everybody runs both; you have a front stage for your dentist and a back stage in the car afterward. What is different about media is not that a performance exists, since a performance always exists, but that the back stage has been made structurally unreachable and the front stage has been refined by people whose profession is refining it. And then something cleverer happens: the front stage begins to include a depiction of the back stage. The unfiltered post. The tearful video recorded in a car. Sincere, often. Still on the stage.

Now turn the arrangement around, because this is where it stops being comfortable. Aurel is forty-one and writes about his father’s death on a public account, which is how several thousand strangers arrived. He answered every message for a few months, then most of them, and now he opens the app in the morning and finds several hundred people’s worst nights waiting. He has learned to read one in four seconds and sort it. He is not ungrateful and says so often. He also cannot receive any of those people as a person, and not from coldness: at that volume the only available operation is aggregate. A number that moved. A mood in a comment section. One side reduces a person to a feeling; the other reduces a person to a quantity; nobody in the arrangement has met anybody.

So where is the line, if everybody does this and nobody is doing anything wrong? Not between people who have these attachments and people who do not, because that second group is empty. Not intensity either, which is a terrible instrument; some of the most attached people are also the most connected, their capacity simply being large, and some of the most guarded would tell you they are barely a fan of anything. The line is about what the attachment is doing. Alongside means it occupies its own space, fills hours that were always going to be solitary, and costs the rest of your life nothing. Instead of means it has begun taking territory, quietly, because it is easier and never has a bad night.

Three checks separate those, and each takes about a minute. The telling test: think of the last genuinely good thing that happened to you and recall who you first wanted to tell, in the half-second before judgment arrived. A first impulse toward somebody unreachable is common and harmless; whether a second name arrives behind it is the whole finding. The subtraction test: if the show simply ended tomorrow, no scandal, would a slot be empty or a category be empty? A slot refills. A category means the attachment has been doing structural work. The direction test: over the last few weeks, has it been sending you toward people or away from them?

Sylvie ran a version of the second one without knowing it had a name. After a hospital appointment she noticed she had rehearsed the whole story, twice, in detail, as something she would say to two men who cannot hear her, and had not yet told her brother, who is alive and reachable and would have wanted to know. She did not stop listening, and nothing in this course will suggest she should have. What she did was ring her brother, and the story was worse out loud, and it ran on for nearly an hour because he kept interrupting, and it is now the only version of that story anybody else in the world holds. The attachment was never the problem. The vacancy behind it was.