In 1956, researchers Horton and Wohl described something they had noticed about television audiences: people were forming genuine emotional bonds with personalities they had never met and never would. They felt affection, familiarity, even concern for figures who had no awareness of their existence. Horton and Wohl called these parasocial relationships and at the time the phenomenon was mostly treated as a curiosity of broadcast media.

When the Terminator films first depicted Skynet becoming self-aware, the moment was presented as a turning point not only for humanity, but for the idea of intelligence itself. In the film, this “self-awareness” meant more than simply processing information or adapting to input. It signified the recognition of one’s own existence, the ability to formulate independent goals and the emergence of a self-preservative instinct.

For most of the history of modern journalism, “reading the news” has been understood as an active, often solitary, one to one encounter between a reader and an author’s text. Even in its most passive forms, such as scrolling through a feed and browsing through headlines in the morning, reading implied a degree of direct contact with journalistic output, hence with the words a journalist chose, the framing an editor approved and the story a newsroom decided to publish.