Technology,fandom and community in the second media age

Abstract

The virtual or online community was considered by Mark Poster (1995) to be central to what he called the second media age, marked as distinct from the first media age by new modes interactivity and subjectivity afforded by internet technologies. Community is also central to participatory culture, the study of which began at the cusp of the second media age. This paper critically examines the technocultural formation of online community in the context of fandom and its relationship to specific platforms from Usenet to Tumblr. Based on the analysis of interview data collected from participatory fans (n = 33), I argue that not all platforms enable community formation. While the participants had a sense of community as members of listservs, Yahoo groups and LiveJournal, the same was not true of Facebook, Twitter and Tumblr, even though they afforded a number of fannish pleasures. These findings raise questions as to the ongoing centrality of online community in the late second media age.

Keywords

community fandom internet participatory culture social media

With the incipient introduction of the information ‘superhighway’ and the integration of satellite technology with television, computers and telephone, an alternative to the broadcast model, with its severe technical constraints, will very likely enable a system of multiple producers/distributors/consumers, an entirely new configuration of communication relations in which the boundaries between those terms collapse. A second age of mass media is on the horizon. (Poster, 1995: 3)

In anticipating the disruption of the broadcast model through convergence, Mark Poster (1995) was also envisioning the disruption of its modernist logic. Following Baudrillard, he contended that the cluster of information and communication technologies (ICTs) were ‘creating a major force that is uncontainable by modern positions’ (1995: 19). The restrictive, unilateral technologies of the first age of mass media reinforced and naturalized a system of few producers and many consumers, which in turn encouraged technologically deterministic models of transmission and massification to account for that system. Poster argued that ICTs, in contrast, serve to foster new modes of subject constitution brought about by new modes of interactivity. He identified the virtual or online community as one iteration of the postmodern virtualities that define the second media age.

Community has always been at the heart of participatory media culture (Bacon-Smith, 1992; Jenkins, 1992), and participatory fans were among the early adopters of ICTs. SF [Science Fiction]-LOVERS was one of the earliest listservs dating back to the ARPANET of the 1970s (Sterling, 1993). GEnie, a rival to CompuServe that was set up in 1985, had ‘roundtables’ dedicated to various fandoms (Hellekson and Busse, 2006). According to Baym (2000), rec.arts.tv.soaps was one of the oldest newsgroups on Usenet, a pre-Internet service set up in 1980. In the ensuing years, a body of research has taken form that examines online fan communities on a number of these platforms as well as on early social networking sites such as MySpace and LiveJournal (see Baym, 2000; Booth, 2010; Bury, 1998; Bury, 2005; Gray et al., 2007; Hellekson and Busse, 2006; Jenkins, 2006).

The rapid adoption of a new generation of ICTs in recent years has served not only to disrupt the broadcast model in ways not possible at the time The Second Media Age (Poster, 1995) was published but also to expand participatory culture, in part, by creating multiple, visible entry points into fandom (Bury, 2008b). ‘Fandom’, contends Jenkins, ‘is everywhere and all the time, a central part of the everyday lives of consumers operating within a networked society’ (2007: 361). Therefore, it should not be surprising that fans are prolific users of social media. At the time of writing, the official Youtube channel for the American specialty network HBO series, Game of Thrones has over 1.6 million subscribers. A search for Game of Thrones videos yielded over 2.25 million results. The series’ official Facebook page has almost 18 million ‘likes’ and the official Twitter account has almost 3.5 million followers. A number of studies have been conducted on the use of social media by fans (see Bennett, 2014a; Deller, 2011; Highfield et al., 2013; Jenkins et al., 2013; Marwick et al., 2014; Wood and Baughman, 2012). To date however, there are no studies that analyse social media in direct relation to community making. A 2011 survey by the Pew Research Center (Smith, 2011) raises questions about the use of these platforms for this purpose: Two-thirds of American users of social media stated that their prime reasons for doing so are to stay in touch with current friends and family members. Only 14% said that a major reason to go on these sites is to ‘connect with others with shared hobbies or interests’, with 57% saying that this was not a reason at all. Only 9% said that they are looking to make new friends, with 50% saying this was not a reason at all (Smith, 2011).

At its broadest this article offers an empirical investigation of the formation of online community in the context of participatory culture and its relationship to specific platforms from Usenet to Tumblr. I conducted interviews with over 30 self-identified participatory fans as part of a larger research project entitled Television 2.0. After outlining the concept of online community, and providing background on the study and methods, I will provide a detailed discussion of the findings. The data samples I will present demonstrate that not all platforms enable community formation. While the participants had a sense of community as members of listservs, Yahoo groups and LiveJournal, the same was not true of Facebook, Twitter and Tumblr, even though they afforded a number of fannish pleasures. Taken together these findings raise questions as to the ongoing centrality of online community in the late second media age.

Community and fandom across the ages

Poster’s interest in computer-mediated communication was piqued by Howard Rheingold, who talked about ‘the social aggregations that emerge from the Net when enough people … carry on discussions long enough, with sufficient feeling, to form webs of personal relationships’ (1993: 5). Poster built on this definition arguing that ‘the Internet … open[s] the possibility of new kinds of interactivity such that the idea of an opposition of real and unreal community is not adequate to specify the differences between modes of bonding’ (p. 35). All communities thus need to be understood as discursive constructions with specific histories of interactivity and specific sets of practices. As Judith Butler (1990) said with regard to the body, what gives a community its substance is the routinized, regular, sustained repetition of a variety of acts or practices. ‘What makes a community vital to its members is their treatment of the communications as meaningful and important. Virtual and real communities mirror each other in chiasmic juxtaposition’ (Poster, 1995: 36).

‘Real-life’ (RL) media fan communities began to form around the original Star Trek series in the mid-1960s but were dismissed or rendered invisible by first media age logic, which characterized viewers as mindless ‘dupes’ parked in front of the ‘boob tube’. The 1980s marked the appearance of an alternative analytic to the dominant transmission/massification models, that of audience reception, which emphasizes the active viewer and the processes of signification (see Hall, 1980). Jenkins directly challenges the notion that cultural texts ‘disintegrate’ and/or lose their value through ‘irreverent consumption’ (Adorno, cited in Jenkins, 1992: 51). On the contrary, texts ‘accumulate’ meaning through repeated use (p. 51): Fannish reading, he argues, is ‘a process, a movement from the initial reception of a broadcast toward the gradual elaboration of the episodes and their remaking in alternative terms’ (p. 53). Fans thus need to be understood as textual poachers who do not uncritically accept the meanings offered by content producers but instead collectively engage in a range of interpretative and creative practices (Jenkins, 1992).

Jenkins (1992) and Bacon-Smith (1992) use ‘community’ to refer to not only fan culture and fandom, akin to Anderson’s (1983) notion of imagined community, but also groups in which members have direct contact and the possibility of interaction with each other. Jenkins did not do a close analysis of any particular community, instead referencing a number of RL communities and fandoms associated with fan conventions, local chapters of fan clubs and the cultural production and distribution of fan art, fiction, music and video. Bacon-Smith conducted ethnographic research with members of all-female Star Trek, Blake 7 and The Professionals fanzine and video communities, whom she met through conventions in the 1980s. Bacon-Smith made the case that fan communities can be divided into ‘interest groups’ and ‘circles’. The first were composed of up to 500 participants (an estimate that is never backed up with empirical evidence) who were acquaintances and interacted via mail and/or face-to-face or knew of each other through ‘reputation’. Such groups provided a sense of unity but were ‘far too large to meet the personal needs of its members for close connection’ (p. 26). These needs were met by the much smaller groups, or circles of friends, which relied heavily on regular face-to-face communication.

With the introduction of ICTs, the boundary between the larger mediated fandoms and the smaller interactive communities began to blur. Asynchronous computer-mediated communication enabled the formation of interactive communities beyond the limitations of both corporeal presence in a common physical space as well as at a common time. Baym (2000) and I (Bury, 2005) conducted ethnographic case studies of community-making practices among fans on a Usenet newsgroup and a private women-only listserv, respectively. Our studies provide empirical evidence of Poster’s contention that virtual communities are ‘meaningful and important’ to their members and are no less ‘real’ than those based in a geographical location. Ultimately it is empirical investigation that determines whether a set of interactional practices constitute a community, whether taking place on the floor of a fan convention, on a listserv or on a social media platform.

The broader question that informs this research concerns the future of online community making: Do social media platforms serve to enable community in the same way that listservs, newsgroups, discussion boards and LiveJournal did, and continue to do? More specifically, do fans who have been or are members of communities on older platforms engage in community making on Facebook, Twitter and Tumblr? In the next section, I will provide background information on and a discussion of the methods that informed both the larger research project and the specific subset of data analysed to answer this question.

Method

The Television 2.0 Project is a mixed methods study that examined shifting patterns of television viewing and of participation in fan culture afforded by new technologies. It is best classified as quant-QUAL (Morgan, referenced in Hesse-Biber and Leavy, 2011). Hence it is primarily a qualitative study but has a quantitative component. Data were collected using an online survey questionnaire followed by telephone and Skype interviews. The study was launched at the Flow television conference in September 2010. The link to the survey was shared via email, websites, and social media using snowball sampling. Individuals and groups with links to communication/media studies as well as participatory culture were targeted initially and asked to share with their professional, personal and fan networks. The survey was also used to recruit interview participants by including a final optional question to agree to be contacted for an interview. Of the 671 respondents who completed the survey by April 2011 when it closed, 281 agreed to be contacted. Of those, 110 responded by email reconfirming their interest in being interviewed. The interviews were semi-structured, the questions designed to expand on the closed-question format of the questionnaire and customized for each participant. A total of 72 interviews were completed, ranging from 30 min to 2.5 h, with follow-up email exchanges with select participants for clarifications and additional detail as required. For the 33 participants who indicated involvement in participatory culture, a topical life history was built. Kirby, Greaves and Reid describe such a history as ‘similar to a life history except that only one part of a person’s experience is described’ (2006: 160). As Gallant points out, ‘the value in stories about particular people in a specific context is especially useful…where the body of published research is limited’ (2008: 247). Moreover, the thick descriptive data allow the researcher to make connections to larger social processes and practices (Hesse-Biber and Leavy, 2011), in this case online community-making practices, even without the full benefit of participant observation.

The interview questions were not designed to specifically address the issue of community. Rather the latter arose out of the data coding and preliminary analysis of the participatory fan histories in combination with the responses to a set of questions on social media use, which included specific questions about Facebook and Twitter. Since a number of participants mentioned the use of Tumblr for fannish activities, this platform was also included in the analysis. In terms of demographics, almost half of the participatory fans (n = 15, henceforth referred to as participants) were in the 18–29 age cohort, eight in the 30–39 cohort, seven in the 40–49 cohort and two in the 50–59 group. The vast majority were female (n = 28). Finally in terms of the country where they were living at the time of the interview, seventeen were in the United States, five in the United Kingdom, four in Canada and two in Australia. The remaining five were based in Argentina, Brazil, India, the Netherlands and New Zealand, respectively.

The discussion of the findings below is divided into three sections related to ‘periods’ within the second media age, each broadly defined by the use of a particular configuration of ICTs by participatory fans. The early second media age is that discussed by Poster (1995) and includes bulletin board services (BBS), listservs (mailing lists), Usenet newsgroups and the ‘next generation’ of discussion forums such as Yahoo groups and fanforum.net. The middle period begins with the introduction of LiveJournal in 1999. The last is the contemporary period of the late second media age dominated by social media. This final section is subdivided into a discussion of the three platforms: Facebook, Twitter and Tumblr. Finally, the number and length of the data samples included in the findings section reflect my position on the importance of thick data and the value of the ‘voices’ of the participants to share their experiences in their own words.

Fandom goes online

Of the small number of participants who were old enough to have been involved in pre-Internet fandom, only Revan and Willow had a connection to participatory culture as readers of fanzines. It was access to the Internet, however, that provided Willow with the opportunity to become involved in fandom and fan communities:

When I got to college in the late 1980s, I got on to Usenet. That’s when things really blossomed for me, on a lot of levels. I came to social maturity on Usenet and the local BBS system at my college .… Had great deep and/or silly conversations with people about Star Trek, Doctor Who, Monty Python – and later, Red Dwarf, Buffy, and on and on. (Willow)

Revan linked his discovery of the Internet in 1996 with a ‘rediscovery’ of fandom in relation to series such as The X-Files, Highlander and Xena: Warrior Princess, for which he joined a number of Usenet newsgroups. Several of the other older participants became participatory fans because of the Internet. Mary, for instance, first got Internet access in 1998.

I was a huge Star Trek Voyager fan. HUGE. I didn’t have an email address but I discovered fan fiction [online]. My husband at that time was a graduate student working on his PhD. Because he was a graduate student, he had kind of an unlimited access to paper because he had to print a lot of stuff. I didn’t have a flash drive. I didn’t have my own computer or anything like that. We only had one computer. I was printing out fan fiction. I have 55, 3–5” notebooks of Star Trek fan fiction to this day!

Once she got her own computer and email address a year later, she saw a post recommending Yahoo groups for the series The Sentinel:

That was a fandom that I got into and I made a lot of friends. I mean, I am talking about people who are friends that I have never met but I have known for 10 years online that I have run businesses with and all kinds of things. And it’s still a very active, close fandom even though the show has been off the air for more than 10 years. (Mary)

Elly is an interesting boundary case between the first and second media ages. After The X-Files pilot aired in the fall of 1993, she joined the official X-Files club:

[Chris Carter] approved everything; all the extras that we used to get. I mean, I still have the stuff somewhere. There’s evidence bags, badges, and all kinds of things. And Chris Carter approved all that stuff because he worked closely with this fan club …. They had a newsletter they put out and fans could write and put stuff into the newsletter. (Elly)

She was thrilled when the article she had written concerning problems with accuracy of a particular episode was published in the newsletter. As soon as she got Internet access, on 1 July 1996 to be precise, she immediately sought out X-Files websites and listservs and through the list conversations and fan fiction archives, she learned about and got involved in other fandoms such as Millennium and Forever Knight. As for the original fan club, ‘I kind of let my membership die out. I just didn’t renew because here’s this huge world of everything.’ This last statement highlights the central role that early ICTs played in making participatory culture more visible and accessible, thereby affording opportunities to create and join fan communities.

Willow made explicit the link between online fandom and community:

My first meaningful contact (snort) with fan communities was online¹ …. With the exception of [an] aunt and her sons, really hadn’t talked to anyone about it. Geekdom was not valued in my peer group and I vividly remember being mocked and bullied for my reading interests …. I don’t know if I would have become part of fandom without [the internet]. I suspect not. That reinforcement of a community that also values, and wants to discuss these cultural artifacts has been really important to me over the years. (Willow)

The younger participants shared similar stories of the discovery of online fandom and engagement in community in relation to the next generation of discussion forums that displaced and replaced Usenet and listservs to some extent: these included Yahoo! Groups, fanforum.com, EZ Boards, Television without Pity and the television network-administered boards:

I was in high school at the time [1999–2000] and I kind of heard rumours about [Roswell] being cancelled so I went to the library and went online and through looking for the cancellation information I found a message board and started to participate in that and kind of follow fandom through that. (Margaret)

It was 2000 when I actually really got access to the internet properly and then I joined the BBC Cult message boards which had an X-Files forum on it. And that was when I started writing more fan fiction, talking to other fans and discussing episodes and stories and stuff like that. (Nem)

Basically, I remember, actually a lot of the fandomy discussion was through Yahoo! groups. I would join these and discuss that way and make friends, etc. We would use the Yahoo! groups to really TALK about fandom… and participate in that way. (Karen)

In addition to the topic-based discussions on series and fan creative works, a number of participants also spoke of personal connections:

I did have [a sense of community] in JAG fandom because I was on a mailing list and you saw more personal things from people and you could discuss things. (Vera)

I think that back in the Usenet day it really was community. It was people discovering each other, really fairly deeply intertwined in each other’s lives. (Revan)

Mary shared her memories of a community response to the 9/11 attack:

On at least 2 different Yahoo! Groups that I was on, somebody popped up and said, ‘Okay, folks. We are doing a roll call’. Just check in; give us whatever information you are comfortable giving because there are some people don’t want to reveal a real name or where they are. But just let us know you are still alive. We actually had some members who lived in New York City. And people were like, ‘Has anybody heard from? Has anybody heard from?’ You know? There were people who were just displaced from their apartments because they couldn’t get home. There was one gal who lived in lower Manhattan and she worked in the World Trade Center and her baby was in a daycare there. The child had got an earache; woke up screaming at 3:00 a.m.; she was at the hospital with her baby and couldn’t get home; couldn’t get to a computer. So when she finally got back home and she goes, ‘Thank you guys for worrying about me. Fortune favored us. We are okay.’

Elsewhere I have made the case that friendship is integral to online fan community and in some cases outlasts interest in the primary text around which the community formed (Bury, 2005; Bury, 2008a). As Mary said, ‘the longer the group has been around the more there is a sense of family and community’. I would add that the design and architecture of listservs, newsgroups and discussion forums plays an important role in enabling the kind of in-depth, sustained interactivity required for community formation and maintenance over the long-term.

The LiveJournal ‘migration’

LiveJournal (often referred to by users and in this article as LJ) is a hybrid of blogging software and social networking site that was launched in 1999 and adopted on a wide scale around 2003 by participatory fans, specifically by those who produce their own creative works, including fan fiction, fan art and graphics as well as video (Coppa, 2006). LJ’s general popularity dropped off sharply in North America with the introduction of MySpace and Facebook; as of 2011, US LJ had 10 million monthly unique visitors, with a core of ‘niche communities’ that include fan creators (Ungerleider, 2012). LJ is based on the individual blog for which members create entries. Members can also upload creative works to share with those on their ‘friends lists’ for comment and discussion:

There is a real immediacy to LiveJournal that’s fantastic….I copy, I paste, I hit submit and suddenly there are a dozen people who have it on their pages because it’s, you know, the early RRS feed kind of idea where it’s delivered. So yeah, it was a pretty early, ‘oh, my gosh this is so perfect for fanfic’ thing. That’s more or less why I migrated over. (Knitmeapony)

In addition, LJ and its ‘clones’ such as Dreamwidth offer ‘community journals’ that are topic centred and thus have a similar function to newsgroups or discussion forums.² The analysis of the data supports the notion of a fan ‘migration’ to LJ. The vast majority of the participants (n = 26) said that they used LJ (as opposed to only 18% of the survey respondents). Like Knitmeapony, almost all were already involved in fan communities on the older platforms. Vera joined LJ when an invite was required, ‘It took a while but eventually I got invited to a rec com ….³ Somebody started friending me and then you start friending more people and you get this community and I like that a lot.’ GeorgeF got her invite in 2003 from ‘my friend who introduced me into fandom’. Zee didn’t need an invitation when she joined in 2004. She had been ‘hanging out on the shipping boards’⁴ when ‘people started to get LJs and we sort of started to shift over there’. Revan and his wife had started writing fan fiction and heard about the LJ communities:

At that time there was a really, really dynamic community of new writers who were really straddling the pro fanfic line. So everybody is just kind of in the same space together reading and commenting on each other’s stuff both fan and pro. (Revan)

Revan also became active in icon making and the LJ icon communities. Hellekson and Busse (2006) participants who migrated from the older platforms, LJ became and remains their fannish home, a place where they have a strong sense of community:

So we might not actually make a comment on each other’s journal for 6 months but then we do. And we still have this continued history that is probably like 6 or 7 years. It’s the people who are doing the same kind of thing that I am doing who I probably feel close to than the people who were just that quick fandom person. (GeorgeF)

A bunch of people that I have never, ever met and I probably never will. But yeah, you kind of get to know everybody or at least who they are sort of within the community. So yeah, it’s nice. (Tarsus)

Several participants commented that the shift to LJ freed them from some of the constraints and norms of fiction archives and listservs administered by others:

So the people that I was talking to [on a message board], some of them had LiveJournals so it was really quite soon after that I started my own LiveJournal. I think it was maybe only weeks and I created it as a place to post my fan fiction. Sort of things that were perhaps not quite suitable for the archive that I was being archived in. (Anna)

Somebody had cross posted at fanfiction.net an Inuyasha [manga] fic and they said, ‘We are not putting the rest of it on fanfiction.net because of the NC17 requirement that you can’t do that. So here’s a chapter posted over here.’ Then I found the communities. It was a whole new world opened up! (Rene)

[W]e also had LiveJournals and instantly you could tell that there was just no traffic on the lists.….I think it’s a really important moment because I think this is when you see Popslash explode.⁵ You know the list mommas before would never have allowed that. And you also see…all the taboo fans associated with Harry Potter explode then. And I mean, in a good way. (Helen)

These samples provide a necessary reminder that community as a social formation should not be uncritically celebrated. Unity and cohesion are, in part, created out of exclusion and through the containment of difference (Singer, 1991). Hellekson and Busse (2006) contend that LJ has created its own set of exclusions, ‘LJ’s software makes it easy to invite people in, but it also makes it easy to shut them out’ (p. 15). A few participants spoke positively about this functionality. Anna, for example, stated that, ‘LiveJournal really suited me because I know exactly who is going to be reading what I am posting.’ Nem liked LJ’s structure of having ‘specific groups for specific things’:

So like with The X-Files, the general X-Files community, kind of everything goes. With the X-Files book club which I am also a member of, you tend to get more not highbrow discussion but there is a lot more discussion about different fan fiction texts and it goes into more detail on what the author was trying to do, her interpretation of it and stuff. (Nem)

These comments are in line with my claim in Cyberspaces of Their Own (2005) that LJ can provide a sense of autonomy and control while still enabling in-depth, sustained interactivity. This was especially important for those fans who had experienced first-hand the ‘fan wars’ that had torn apart some creative fan communities.⁶ Taken together the data presented provide evidence that the platforms associated with the early and middle periods of the second media age afford community making, albeit in different ways.

Fandom and social media

Facebook

Launched in 2004, Facebook is the juggernaut of social media. According to the Pew Center’s 2014 Social Media Update, 71% of US adult Internet users are on Facebook, compared to 28% on Pinterest, 26% on Instagram and 23% on Twitter (Duggan et al., 2015). The use of Facebook was even more ubiquitous among the participants (n = 31). (More than 90% of the survey respondents had Facebook accounts.) Duggan et al. (2015) also report that Facebook serves as the ‘homebase’ for users who use multiple social networking services. On the surface Facebook’s architecture seems similar enough to that of LJ – a timeline/newsfeed aggregation of ‘friends’ posts, individual and group accounts, uploading capabilities for a range of media content – to make it the next logical central hub for participatory fans. The data analysis suggests otherwise:

My Facebook is more like my personal life and my family and friends and I kind of don’t intersect it with my fannish life. (Margaret)

I have a Facebook but all the people on it are people I know from real life, including a number of my fellow students from university campus. So the only overlap with fandom potentially is that would talk about sort of media topics. Otherwise I would say it’s pretty much a non-fandom space for me. Every now and then I post something about Supernatural if I think that I could justify it as interesting. But I don’t generally do that. I generally keep my fannishness out of it. (Diva)

Facebook is where I keep up with people that I know from college and graduate school and with certain people who are current colleagues and were former students. So who I met in an offline capacity, although because some of the people that I met through fandom are now personal friends, I am also connected with some of them on Facebook. (Heresluck)

Participatory fandom has always been premised on making connections and building community with people with similar specific fannish interests, most of whom one does not already know. It is the media text that binds, not prior relations. Facebook, in contrast, is premised on having as large and wide-ranging a social network as possible; hence the algorithm-generated list of ‘people you may know’ with the weakest of ties (friends of friends) to whom one is encouraged to add to one’s network.

The next set of data samples elaborates on a desire to keep fannish interests compartmentalized from other aspects of one’s personal life:

Facebook is just like the blandest possible online presence that I could have. I mostly use it to kind of stay in contact with family and I don’t post really anything that might be personal or interesting on it. I see it as curated online presence that is 100% sanitized! (Zee)

I don’t do fannish stuff on Facebook. Because that’s got my real name in it and because it’s my full real name and because I know there are a bunch of people I know from high school, before high school!!! Relatives even now. It’s like, oh, my God! I was on Facebook, I should explain. I was on Facebook when it was the Facebook. When it was fairly new. Smith [College] was not one of the first but one of the early additions to Facebook when it was sort of a college-based thing only. So I have had a Facebook account since 2004, somewhere in there. (Stevie)

These comments serve as a reminder that participatory fandom is still considered deviant or frivolous. The issue of identity is also flagged. According to Facebook’s desktop Help Center, ‘Facebook is a community where people use their authentic identities. We require people to provide the name they use in real life; that way, you always know who you’re connecting with. This helps keep our community safe.’ In light of the above data samples, this rationale is ironic: Facebook is not considered a fannish space precisely because it is not perceived as a safe space. In contrast, listservs, Usenet, discussion forums and LJ do not attempt to police identity and authenticity. While many fans do end up sharing personal information with others in their communities, it is by choice and at their own pace. That said, Heresluck’s last sentence about fandom friends becoming personal friends suggests that Facebook does have a role to play in sustaining individual friendships beyond the community context. Stevie also noted:

To be Facebook friends with someone who you are in fandom with, to have the privilege of having their real name and contact information which can happen and that does happen and people bond and stuff like that. It does add more depth to it. (Stevie)

The only comments which suggested a sense of community were made in relation to Facebook groups set up by fans, which approximated a LJ community journal.

I had first of all joined a group on Facebook which was the London I Want to Believe get together. It was a big group of fans who would write, ‘If there was a London premiere of The X-Files [movie] we are going to be there.’ So I was like, right, well that sounds good to me. So I joined that and then joined various other X-File groups on Facebook. (Nem)

Everybody just gets to know everybody else. There will be times when people will just have little jokes with each other. You get to kind of know everybody’s preferences and you will kind of go, ‘Wow! Denise, look at this photo.’ It’s usually Zachary Quinto [Star Trek: Into Darkness] just being fabulous! ‘Look at this. Isn’t he wonderful?’ And she will go, ‘Yes, isn’t he wonderful.’ And then everybody will kind of join in. It’s just really knowing what everybody kind of enjoys and everybody is going to find funny. (Tarsus)

In Nem’s case, the ensuing friendships she developed with 12 other members of the group did not come from Facebook interaction alone but from the meet up at the screening of the film. Interestingly, she found out about LJ through Facebook and it is LJ that has become the centre of her fandom. Tarsus found about the Star Trek reboot Facebook group through a Yahoo! group, but it is not clear if she already knew some of the members when she joined.

Twitter

While Duggan et al. (2015) found that Twitter use was less than a third of that of Facebook, the number of participants using the two platforms was the same (n = 31). (In comparison, only 36% of the survey respondents reported using Twitter). The majority used the microblogging service to follow favourite television series, actors and/or showrunners as well as other fans and to check official and unofficial hashtags during a live broadcast:

I know there was quite a few [tweets] a few weeks ago when Supernatural did their Super Uber Meta episode, as they billed it. So there was a ton of live tweeting of that one because everyone was just so excited and wanted to, I don’t know – disseminate as much as possible and as quickly as possible and that seemed to be the way to do it. I don’t remember the hashtag they used but it was trending pretty quickly and pretty high. (Rene)

I’ve got a lot of fannish friends who I follow on there. It was useful, particularly for, there was a signing on Saturday in LA…there is a question and answer session at the book signing to raise money for the American Cancer Society because Kim Manners who produced loads of X-Files, died of cancer. X-Files News, they were at the event doing live tweets. So I was following the signing on Twitter even though I couldn’t be there. (Nem)

What these participants and others found appealing about Twitter was the sense of immediacy, presence albeit a virtual one, and connection. However these samples do not provide evidence of direct interaction or discussion among fans. This finding is in line with Wohn and Na on television viewing and live tweeting: ‘the use of hashtags and re–tweets suggests that although users aren’t directly interacting with specific individuals, they want to be part of a larger group’ (2011: 10) Page (2012) drew a similar conclusion, noting that hashtag use during a live broadcast created a sense of ambient affiliation.

Opinion was divided as to the usefulness of Twitter to engage in meaningful communication, given its 140-character limit.

I have a little bit of luddite in me because there’s something about the idea of people doing fandom on Twitter that really bothers me and I can’t say what it is. I am not anti-Twitter but I just don’t see how it is, I don’t see what it has to offer in terms of communicating between people. I find it a very useful information service. But I don’t understand how people can use it to communicate with each other. (Diva)

I much prefer being on Twitter if I want to communicate links or just random thoughts or whatever. I don’t know why. It’s just, I mean people complain about the character limit but I just, I like Twitter. (Stevie)

Heresluck contrasted the in-depth interaction that she felt was afforded by LJ with the frequency and brevity of interaction imposed by the character limit.

I mean I know that there are people who really enjoy things like say live tweeting a show while they are watching it and seeing all the tweets that other people are posting about Supernatural or whatever. I kind of don’t care about that at all. I am much more interested in seeing someone’s post about it a day or two later when they’ve had a chance to organize their thoughts and produce something sort of interesting and in-depth. That’s my priority. I think this partly has to do with my having a very small circle of people on Dreamwidth and LiveJournal who I read. I am fine if I check LiveJournal or Dreamwidth and no one has updated that day or in a couple of days. I would rather wait until someone has time to do something a little bit more long form than see whatever random 140 character thing they posted to Twitter. (Heresluck)

On the other hand, Anne and Karen found workarounds to have group conversations with those who follow each other through use of the reply function.

I actually do a lot of my fangirling and stuff on Twitter these days…. I have a lot of friends that I am into. Actually I talk a lot of podfic on Twitter. I have mostly podfic people on my Twitter. We will get into like just discussions. How you have giant meta discussions all night in 140 characters. It drives me nuts but I’ve done it more than once. It gets really confusing because there are a lot of us. (Anne)

We @ at each other and links things to each other: did you see this? That kind of thing. Part of it is of being able to have live conversation about things that come out. New information comes out and you are able to talk about it. I get my information from Twitter and then I am able to retweet and point other people to it and talk about it in that space rather than sort of like going to email or something like that. (Karen)

Yet when asked what made Twitter a fannish space, Karen replied that she had ‘a lot of fandom friends on Twitter’, meaning people whom she already knew. Although LJ is no longer a source of fan information, she still goes there for ‘fan fiction and other sort of community type activities’. As for Freda, ‘fandom happens on LiveJournal…or increasingly for me, on Twitter.’ When asked how she found fans to follow she replied, ‘Most of the people I follow on Twitter I already met on LiveJournal first.’ In Anne’s case, she started interacting with other American Idol fans with whom she had no previous connection. When asked about Twitter and community she said, ‘You can build a community though if you are willing to follow a lot of people. I don’t use it this way.’

That said, one of the pleasures of Twitter for some is precisely the lack of community ties:

A lot of my friends have joined but for a long time Twitter was kind of space away from friends. Or away from my immediate community. There was also something nice about having an opinion about the latest episode and kind of just shouting it out there whether people heard it or not. (Buffy)

Knitmeapony made a similar point, contrasting the experience of live tweeting to commenting on an LJ post:

There is something about nobody’s in control, if that makes sense. I mean, everybody in the comment section and we can all go but it is still somebody’s LiveJournal post. You know, somebody still started this and they gathered their friends to do this thing. And if you follow a hashtag on Twitter, like there is, I mean, I have been part of global ‘oh, come on’s’!! Where literally there are people and I have no idea who they are…. That person would never wander across my LiveJournal. They just wouldn’t. So there is really something there that I couldn’t get. It’s less and less and less walled garden with social media. (Knitmeapony)

I argue, however, that the pleasure of ambient affiliation does not extend to all social media platforms. As I hope to have demonstrated above, Facebook offers even more of a ‘walled garden’ experience than LJ.

Tumblr

Tumblr was last included in the Pew Center’s annual social media reports in 2012, where it ranked last of the 5 platforms included at only 6% (Duggan and Brenner, 2012). In the 2015 Teens, Social Media & Technology Overview (Lenhart, 2015), Tumblr also ranked last in terms of use by American teens at 14%. Although lacking mass popularity, the re-blogging service combines aspects of LJ and Twitter that make it appealing to participatory fans (Bennett, 2014b). Given the age demographic of the participants, it is not a surprise that only one-third had even tried Tumblr (n = 11) and all but one were under 30. Knitmeapony spoke about the ease with which fan fiction and videos can be uploaded and shared and gave a couple of examples of its creative use:

The image macro and the animated gifs from awesome points in episodes is definitely something that is very Tumblr focused. Right now for some bizarre reason everybody is replacing random words in the dialogue of X-Men First Class with the word ‘cupcake.’ And it’s everywhere! You know, ‘Mark my works Eric. Cupcakes will not bring you peace. Cupcakes were never an option.’ (Knitmeapony)

While others appreciated the content sharing functionality, they did not find Tumblr particularly suitable for conversation:

It’s a really hard platform to have a conversation on because there is not really a lot of commenting capability. You have to re-blog stuff to really make a comment and it’s extensive. So it’s kind of like you can get these posts that are just like long lines of people talking back and forth and I am just like, I can’t read this. (Stevie)

I think the problem with Tumblr is that it doesn’t have threaded discussions or you are re-blogging everything. So I think if it did have threaded discussion I think it would be perfect for fandom and I think fandom probably would have jumped on it much faster. But as it is, like so much of fandom is discussion that it’s just, I don’t think it’s ever going to be that ideal of a fit. (Anne)

It seems like when they built Tumblr that they didn’t build it for a community purpose. Even though it’s claimed to be that way. Because you cannot comment on other people’s things. You can if they are following you for 2 weeks, they can reply to you but then you can’t to reply to their reply. So that’s one of the frustrations. (Julianna)

As with Twitter, these data samples point to the limitations of the platform not only for commenting coherently and cohesively but for interactivity. And as with Twitter, workarounds can be found, with Revan noting ‘some really phenomenal recent gender [and race] discussions’ akin to those taking place on LJ. At the same time, he complained that ‘with the shortness of the format it’s more just people largely talking at each other’. Community making requires a group of people talking to one another. Taken together, the three platforms discussed in this section offer a range of fannish pleasures, but their architectures do not enable community formation.

Whither community in the late second media age?

While one must be cautious in making generalizations from a small, although rich data subset, the findings do trace out a connection between platform architecture and community formation in participatory culture. Pre-Internet BBS, Usenet newsgroups and listservs provided entry points into fandom for those fans who felt passionately about a media text but often had few people IRL (in real life) with whom to share their fannish interests. Revan, echoing Rheingold (1993) and Poster (1995), recalled the sense of enthusiam and possibility in the early second media age: ‘Hey, we are fans! And fans are hard to find and we have found our tribe. Let’s hang out!’ These platforms enabled the formation of communities and friendships through features and formats that encouraged in-depth, extended and regular interaction with people one did not previously know. The discussion forums that began appearing in the late 1990s were more technologically advanced versions of the older platforms. LJ, however, marked a clear shift away from the centrality of the group forum and the collectivity it engendered, to the individual blog and personalized network. Yet it gained traction with participatory fans because it still supported sustained engagement. Although LJ did not replace the other platforms, it did displace them to a degree, becoming a central hub for the creative communities in particular.

That social media platforms have not become ‘fan community central’ in the late second media age 10 years after their introduction can be attributed to the limitations of their architectures and functionalities in enabling in-depth interactivity. While Facebook, Twitter and Tumblr offer participatory fans a range of pleasures, they do not enable community formation. Indeed the discussion of the Facebook data suggests that this platform may actually disable community formation. As the comments by Revan, Anne and Karen indicate, the use of technology is never limited to its original design and can always be repurposed (Gill and Grint, 1995). Nonetheless, the power of platform architecture, its prescribed use and the sets of social relations that surround and define technology should not be underestimated. The ‘dream’ of sociality and community that infused the design of early ICTs has been replaced by the networked individualism (Wellman, cited in Fernback, 2007: 54) of social media.

As for the future of the online community, it is important to consider Poster’s understanding of the relationship between media ages:

The insertion of a period may not suggest a passage from one site of being to another but a complexification, a folding in of one structure upon another, a multiplying or multiplexing of different principles in the same social space. Periods or epochs do not succeed but implicate one another, do not replace but supplement one another, are not consecutive but simultaneous. (1995: 69)

The same can be said of the periods within a media age. While it is highly unlikely that anyone would set up a new mailing list for fan discussion today, some of the established listservs are still around and remain central to fans (Bury, 2008a). Mary’s deepest community ties, for instance, remain with her Sentinel lists, which are still active years after the series went off the air. As illustrated by Nem’s discovery of LJ through Facebook, social media can serve as an entry point for younger fans to fan communities established on older platforms. Social media can also support the maintenance and extension of already established community relations and friendships forged through fandom as noted by Stevie and Heresluck. It is also possible that younger fans will use social media to ‘do’ participatory fandom differently, finding ways to establish a sense of connection without being part of an online community. Revan’s comment is suggestive of what this might look like:

Much of my community is now is dropping a one-liner comment somewhere on a Tumblr blog, on Facebook, and while I can see I have more options for seeing that there are other people out there who share my interests, it is so attenuated. (Revan)

The online community will not disappear, but it may well become residual to borrow a term from Raymond Williams (1977). Further empirical investigation will be needed before we know if a new iteration of participatory fandom, one that is not organized around community, or a third media age for that matter, is on the horizon.

Footnotes

Notes

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