Throughout the twentieth century, significant shifts have occurred in the ways in which fandom operates, partially as a result of the increasingly integral role digital technologies have come to have within our everyday practices. The phrase ‘digital technologies’ refers to the tools used to share, analyse, and create information, using binary code. This may comprise software, online systems, or the hardware used to access such facilities. In recent years, scholarly discussion has emerged concerning the sociological impact of digital technologies, notably in the work of Deborah Lupton.1 However, there is little academic writing that considers the effects such developments have had on music fans and fan groups in particular. Taking the fans of British pop group One Direction, known as 'Directioners', as an example, consideration will be given to the ways in which fans interact and engage with the object of their fandom, and with one another since the wide-spread dissemination of digital technologies. Moreover, this essay will discuss whether, in this age of technological ubiquity, fandom is a useful concept in debates concerning how an individual's identity is constructed. In cogitating this question, one must account for the conviction that the relationship between the two concepts is irreconcilably problematic, or, at least, limited.
Firstly, in order to determine the impact that digital technology has upon the ways in which music fandom operates today, one must consider the implications of each of the functions undertaken by such tools. As Henry Jenkins highlights, numerous consequences arise for contemporary fandom as a result of the increased speed and scope of communication provided by ‘the new digital environment’.2 Thi...
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... 2000), 112.
Joli Jenson, 'Fandom as Pathology: The Consequences of Characterization', in Lisa L. Lewis (ed.), The Adoring Audience: Fan Culture and Popular Media (publication), 9- 29; here, 13.
Nancy K. Baym, Personal Connections in the Digital Age (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2010), 21.
Online Resources
Deborah Lupton, Digital Sociology: An Introduction (Sydney: University of Sydney, 2012), http://ses.library.usyd.edu.au//bitstream/2123/8621/2/Digital%20Sociology.pdf (accessed 1st November 2013).
http://www.mtv.co.uk/news/one-direction/333439-one-direction-x-factor-uk-tour-dates-here (accessed 12th November 2013).
http://www.twitter.com (accessed 12th November 2013).
'Crazy about One Direction', http://www.channel4.com/programmes/crazy-about-one-direction/4od (accessed 25th November 2013).
http://www.ask.fm (accessed 25h November 2013).
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The topic of technology and our society has become a very controversial subject today. Many people believe that technology is an essential component of our modern world, helping us to improve communication from farther distances as well as giving us easy access to important information. On the other hand, there is the opinion that too much technology is affecting social interactions and our basic development. “Technology…is a queer thing, it brings you great gifts with one hand, and stabs you in the back with the other.” (Carrie Snow.) The CBC Documentary “Are We Digital Dummies” displayed the pros and cons when it comes to modern technology that we use in the western world everyday.
...eness to Traynor’s death. In the years before his death Jackson’s life had gone downhill at an alarming speed and nothing seemed to stop it. However, upon news of his death people began listening to his music again praising him and watching movies in which he had been in. The term that can be used for this is “bandwagon” in which anyone joins in and doesn’t have to have extensive knowledge of the thing or person, they only need similar interests or reasons. Michael Jackson’s cds Thriller and Bad are the examples that can be used because people would take Thriller the cd’s title song and Smooth Criminal and replay them constantly claiming to be “True Fans”. The definition of a true fan is someone who not only knows the artist’s background but their music as well and enjoys listening to more than one song and doesn’t listen to them just because of physical appearance.
A fan in today’s world is usually characterized as the result of the “star system” portrayed in society due to mass media where media figures’ lives are constantly emphasized on a day to day basis. The internet and society are obsessed with news concerning celebrities, and knowing about their personal life. Today’s social media keeps fans constantly updated about celebrities, giving fans the illusion that they know everything about that celebrity and that they are connected somehow. This type of mass media has made the difference between appropriate behavior and inappropriate behavior of fans less noticeable (Lewis 11). These types of fans, the pathological fans, are also classified as the “o...
Alternative rock music of the nineties successfully captured the distress of a young generation afflicted by multiple struggles. First and foremost, this music genre accurately voiced the concerns of those who could not imagine a thriving future as prosperous members of society, and for whom the American dream was nothing but a distant notion. For instance, in his song “Loser”, Beck Hansen skillfully described the apathy that overtakes an individual’s being when he is faced with life´s unavoidable grim prospects. Similarly, this kind of music resonated with all those individuals who were struggling to feel comfortable in their own skin. To illustrate, in one of its most popular songs, “Creep”, the alternative rock band Radiohead managed to convey the excruciating angst experienced ...
Rideout, Victoria and Hamel, Elizabeth. (2006). “The Media Family: Electronic Media in the Lives of
Ramsay, D. (2012). The Rise of EDM | Music Business Journal | Berklee College of Music. [online] Thembj.org. Available at: http://www.thembj.org/2012/10/the-rise-of-edm/ (Accessed: 20 May 2014).
The wishful compulsion in the mixtape toward a collective musical totality is therefore perhaps fatally mixed with its tendency toward idealized versions of late twentieth-century history. The personal and cultural nostalgia that has come to characterize the mixtape and the restorative nostalgia that yearns to redeem earlier moments in individual and consumer history, are twin waves that erode the utopian potential of the mixtape, a form that otherwise counterpoises so provocatively the bought and the free, the personal and impersonal, the private and the collective, and the past and the future. Newer technological instantiations of the mixtape may only serve to seduce us through nostalgia into buying more deeply into capitalist phantasmagoria.
Van Buskirk, Eliot. "SoundCloud Threatens MySpace as Music Destination for Twitter Era." Wired.com. Conde Nast Digital, 6 July 2009. Web. 10 Mar. 2014. .
As case and point, “the impact of the Internet is far greater than any other communicative tool in the history of mass communications” (Elliot, 2008, para. 1). With an expansive, yet extremely convenient means to electronically join people through business, relationships, education and more, Sociology assumes the ...
Music and the relationships of music have changed drastically in our society. The course of studies and the evaluations of the applications of the technology of music, the making and the listening of music have changed in the way we listen to music, the styles of music in our society and in the media. The importance of the technology in music today, has, over the past century been charted through the study of musical examples and through viewing how human values are reflected in this century's timely music. There are very many different types of music that are listened to. There are readings, writings, lectures and discussions on all the different types of music.
Fandoms are considered to have a positive ideology. However, there is some discretion over the intensity of devotion from fans with some fandoms being critiqued as having a more worshipful audience, than what is considered the ‘norm’. These texts that have a more worshipful audience are often “defined as ‘cult media’ through the fact that such media texts attract passionate, enduring, and socially organized fan audiences.” (Hills, 2000) This explains the main difference between Cult fandom and more mainstream fandom, which is down to the intensity of fan activity. Fans are dedicated to their cult interest and often create strong emotional bonds with characters, actors, directors and producers, which goes beyond the
There is a paucity of academic literature on Jim Morrison, yet a reasonable amount of popular literature, which I am engaging in my evaluation. Scholarship on dead celebrity fandom has progressed in the last decade; however, in 1998, John Frow (1998, 200) claimed that “we lack almost completely the tools to make sense of [the process by which dead celebrities are sacralized].” My hope is that by outlining the role of Morrison in self-propagating his own myth, combined with a posthumous documentation of this process, I will contribute to literature on dead celebrity fandom.
In this essay I ultimately want to address the musical episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, "Once More with Feeling" (season 6, episode 7). However, I do not want to look at this episode in isolation from the remainder of the Buffy franchise but rather argue that it exemplifies a certain entertainment strategy that courses through the Buffyverse. Now it seems to me that entertainment is either too often denigrated as a specific ideological formation that produces negative effects of audience passivity as against more overtly challenging texts, or, alternatively, entertainment is celebrated within a postmodern theoretical framework that views the multiplicity of pleasures afforded as inherently productive and even oppositional. Alternatively I want to concentrate on entertainment for entertainment's sake which is to say as a dialectical operation that in Fredric Jameson's terms intermingles wish fulfilment and repression by arousing radical fantasies in order to contain them (Jameson, 1990: 25).
The term “fandom” is thought to have first come into use in 1903, which is when Merriam-Webster’s dictionary first found evidence of the term being used, though its meaning has since evolved. The fandom of 2014 is very different to the fandom of 1903, and this is because of the fact that as the world evolved, so did the meaning of the word “fandom”. Social media is the main reason for the fact that fandom is used to refer to many different areas of interest. Sites such as “Tumblr” and “Twitter” have allowed fans to form a global community with those who share ...
Technology is changing how we think and act at younger ages. The term “technology” doesn’t only mean manufacturing processes and equipment necessary for production, it also defines a social space and could be a social problem which makes a real impact on social reality. Different types of social software affect a variety of aspects and have both positive and negative impacts. It's important to be aware of how a digitally-driven life is changing our education, sense of self, relationships, social interaction, consumerism, and ways of doing business around the world.