This document discusses different types of fans and their relationship to popular culture and media. It addresses: 1) How fans actively engage with media they enjoy and identify with, sometimes making it a significant part of their self-identity. 2) How fans are not passive audiences but active and critical, sometimes producing their own creative works like fan films or fiction. 3) The concept of "anti-fans" who strongly dislike and define themselves in opposition to certain media texts or genres. 4) How music fans use the internet as a resource to deepen their fandom and connect with others through social networks and creative works.

1. Fandom and
Popular Culture
Active Audiences

2. Fans??
• What are you a fan of?
• How do you interact?
• Would you class yourself as a “true fan?”
Why?

3. Active
Audiences
• How can Marxist studies and others alike suggest
that an audience is completely passive in the 21st
Century??
• Being a fan is one part, and sometimes a highly
significant part, of our self-identities. What‟s
been dubbed ‘media fandom’ – the detailed
appreciation of particular media texts is, for some
people, just as much an aspect of who they are
as, say, their class, age, or their gender.

4. ‘Uses and Gratifications’
concerns what people do
with the media, rather than
how they might become
attached to, and invested
in, particular media texts.
• Fans are highly critical and
creative audiences; they don‟t
just criticise their beloved
shows or franchises when they
fall short of expectation, they
also make their own fan
films, or write their own fan
fiction.

5. The Anti-Fan
• Do you dislike something in the media so much you would
call yourself an anti fan? Is there a type of music that you
purposefully say you don‟t like? Why??
• Anti-fans are people who are passionate about a media
text, but negatively so; they loathe or detest what they
take it to represent.
• ‘Horror films are allegedly sick and twisted and those who
enjoy them are wrong in the head’ (according to horror’s
many anti-fans).
• Whereas media fandom might allow us to
define, culturally, what sort of person we are, with what
sort of tastes and interests, ‘anti-fandom’ is about who
we are not, and what sorts of identities we seek to define
ourselves against, and in strong opposition to.

6. ‘Morrisey and the Smiths had such an impact on me Music
when I was an outcast in High School. He changed my
life – I wouldn’t be here otherwise. My Chemical
Fandom
romance’s desire to save people stems from what The
Smiths did for me.’ (Gerard Way, frontman My Chemical
and the
romance, interviewed in NME, 10 June 2006) Internet
• What resources are available on the internet for
a music fan? Discuss and feedback.
• How can a fan use the internet to become a
„true fan‟ – Web 2.0!
• How can the internet encourage fans to be
creative and provide a social network to share
their genius (or not)?
• How can all this link into group communication
and identity construction?

7. Potential Question
• Does modern technologies hinder or
assist the Music Industry?