Fan debates that spiral out of control used to be called wank, ostensibly because it was seen as self-aggrandizing with no particular goal except for an anonymous emotional release on the internet, and it was labelled and described as such

Old fandom—in the context of this article, fandom from before the rise of microblogging platforms like Tumblr and Twitter—was a very different place by virtue of being hosted on journaling platforms like LiveJournal or individual domains like GeoCities. The structure

The tension between the private act of journaling and the public sharing of journal entries via a social network architecture makes LiveJournal a site of performance (Kendall 2007; Lindemann 2005). Busse (2006) observes that women sharing fan fiction with one

Morimoto: I’m going to move on and ask each of you, how do you see Tumblr changing fandom? Brennan: I think Tumblr has made fandom way more accessible, and it feels less niche. It’s not like other social networking, where

The two things I think Tumblr really changed are, I think before Tumblr the primary language of fandom was text-based, and it was very much fic and filk—very text-oriented. I think Tumblr changed it so that the culture of memes

I saw people on LiveJournal, but—I have a friend who last year brought up the metaphor of LiveJournal being a dinner party, and Tumblr being a coffee shop. And, obviously, I love throwing a dinner party, but that’s not very

While role-play does offer therapeutic benefits, the recent actions of Tumblr users show fans of certain narratives moving beyond the need to improve one’s own relation to the world. Rather than the world serving the individual, the individual in these

During the 2006–7 television season, the production team and cast for Grey’s Anatomy (2005–) dealt with a series of unfortunate industry events that significantly affected the writers’ room, cast, and ongoing story lines of the show. An actor uttered a

In recent years, patterns of sociability among weblogs (blogs) have been analyzed using link analysis, including within large blog hosting communities such as LiveJournal. Social networks have been identified based on blog topic (e.g., politics), common interests (e.g., fandom), and