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In this article we explore a life course perspective on fandom, with particular emphasis on fandom and adult development. While there is growing interest in issues of age and aging within fan studies and within media studies more broadly, there is a tendency in this literature to discuss aging and the life course atheoretically, ignoring a rich body of scholarship in gerontology, sociology, psychology and human development that examines how lives unfold over time. Our goal in this manuscript is to make explicit what is typically rendered implicit in fan studies by drawing directly on life course perspectives to enrich our understanding of long-term and later-life fandom, and to suggest ways that fan studies might more fully account for fandom over time. This article thus synthesizes two bodies of literature that rarely inform one another: fan studies and life course scholarship.

What happens when g o s s i v n e of the most traditionally intimate forms of communication-"goes public" on electronic bulletin boards? We explore how impersonal trust, generated by the mode of transmission and the social context in which it occurs, alters gossip in particular and observable ways. Drawing upon exchanges about the entertainment industry that are representative of gossip on electronic bulletin boards, we find that members draw upon a variety of resources that shift gossip's verifiability from reliance on intimate social bonds and assurances of truthhlness to overt negotiations that emphasize honesty. We also observe how status and power hierarchies surrounding information are influenced by negotiated honesty. We conclude with some observations about the impact of technologies on the M~U E of social bonds.

Soap opera narratives are subject to multiple and conflicting claims of "ownership" about who is entitled to make evaluative judgments about quality. Our research examines how dedicated fans' claims are mediated within three sites: fan clubs, daytime magazines, and electronic bulletin boards. These sites differ in the frequency and visibility of fan interaction and in the degree to which fan discourse can be managed by producers, which in turn shapes social interaction among fans and the legitimacy with which they can assert claims to the narrative.Television programs are both commodities and cultural products. Their production takes place within a context of conflict over creative and financial considerations among a variety of different organizations, groups, and individuals (Cantor & Cantor, 1992;DiMaggio, 1977;Montgomery, 1989). Research on the television industry finds that network programmers are confronted with managing the inherent conflicts and contradictions that arise from juggling commercial and aesthetic assessment criteria in their search for financial success . Despite network executives' best efforts, there are never guarantees that audiences' tastes will coincide with what programmers hope will be commercially successful products (Gitlin, 1983).Commercial success is the bottom line for anything that airs on network television. Programmers care primarily that their product appeals to large numbers of viewers with demographic profiles that advertisers value, and care little about the meanings, significance, or ritual that television fulfills as a cultural product to a core audience of dedicated fans (Cantor & Cantor, 1986). In the business of television, viewers matter more than fans, but the product itself matters more to fans than to other viewers. The distinction between a television viewer and a television fan is an important one. To "view" television is to engage in a relatively private behavior. To be a "fan," however, is to participate in a range of activities that extend beyond the private act of viewing and reflects an enhanced emotional involvement with a television narrative. Such activities may include purchasing or subscribing to fan magazines, writing letters to actors, producers, writers, or to fan publications, conversing with other fans on electronic bulletin boards, joining fan clubs, attending fan events, and

We explore the future of media fandom through integrating insights from gerontology, human development, fan studies, and marketing. Given population aging and the dismantling of the normative 20th-century life course, along with rapid changes in the extent to which our lives are mediated, fandom is undergoing significant modification. We focus on how new findings on emotional maturation over the life course and scholarly identification of self-narrativization as a resource for 21st-century aging suggest ways that fandom may change over time.

This essay explores different understandings of fans and fandom between sport studies and pop culture studies through presentation of survey data originally collected for a study on global fandom/global fan studies. Email surveys from 65 fan scholars around the world reveal important distinctions between sport scholars and pop culture scholars in terms of their basic understandings of fans and fandom, the role of self-reflexivity in fan research, and the location of sport and other pop culture scholarship in the academy. Analysis points to a disjuncture between sport and pop culture fan studies that ultimately limits the ability to fully understand the range of fan experiences and fandoms.

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We explore the social psychological processes through which fan-based experiences become situated in fans' larger life narratives. Drawing on original survey data with long-term U.S. soap opera fans, we examine how the psychological mechanism of autobiographical reasoning functions in fans' construction of self-narratives over time. The case study presented here is a subset of a larger investigation into the age-related structure of fans' activities, identities, and interpretive capacities. Situated at the intersections of gerontological (life span/life course) theory and contemporary fan studies, our project mines relatively uninvestigated theoretical terrain. We conclude with a brief discussion of implications for future fan studies.