A life course perspective on fandom

Abstract

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.

Musical Life Stories: Narratives on Health Musicking

“…(Frith & Goodwin, 1990;Frith, 1996;Negus, 1996Negus, , 1999Bennett 2001;Shuker, 2001;Straw, 2001, Longhurst, 2007. Fandom is viewed as a means to facilitate self, group and social identity and community whilst also affording personal expression, action, agency and empowerment for people at all stages of their life course (Grossberg, 1984;Lewis, 1992;Cavicchi, 1998;Bennett, 2000;Fast, 2001;Jenkins, 1992Jenkins, , 1996Kotarba et al, 2008;Harrington & Bielby, 2010;Fiske, 2010;Bennett & Taylor, 2012). Indeed, those who have studied musical fandom specifically have located it in terms of its affordances for coping with daily life within the modern technological world.…”

“…As Kotarba et al (2008, p. 114) point out for adult fans many forms of popular music "serve as a critical meaning resource […] as they continuously experience the being of self throughout life." Research into long term fans like DT points out how music can act as 'touch stones' or 'lifelines' as people age (Harrington & Bielby, 2010). In this way being a music fan can shape and maintain "a continuous self by acting as a map or overlay with which to mark the passage of time and organise one's perception of oneself in it" (Cavicchi, 1998, p. 150).…”

Do 3D Moviegoers Enjoy Screenings More than 2D Moviegoers?—On the Impact of 3D Fantasy Movie Perception on Enjoyment

“…The idea of taking these characteristics into account is not new, as Tobar (2006) used them to investigate individual differences in response to the media exposure of the Super Bowl. Although in US culture, the term fan often has negative connotations in the sense of being a ''geeky loser'' who wears Spock ears and lives in his/her parents' basement (Gray, Sandvoss, & Harrington, 2007;Jenkins, 2007), fandom has become a mass phenomenon and is nowadays an integral part of our culture (Fiske, 1992;Gray, Sandvoss, & Harrington, 2007;Harrington & Bielby, 2010). To date, fandom and fanship have mostly been investigated in the context of sports.…”

“…Therefore, fandom refers to the Social Identity Theory by Tajfel (1981;see Reysen & Branscombe, 2010) and the observation that fans perceive themselves as part of a group of people with the same object of interest (e.g., Obst, Zinkiewicz, & Smith, 2002a, 2002b. By contrast, fanship is defined as a personal characteristic, which is quite stable over a lifetime (for a review, see Harrington & Bielby, 2010). Fanship includes emotional connection, identification, and expenditure of energy and money (Reysen & Branscombe, 2010).…”

Transportation em narrativas transmídia: estudo sobre os efeitos cognitivos e sociais da exposição dos fãs a um universo ficcional multiplataforma contemporâneo

“…Assim, acreditamos que um dos principais achados do presente estudo diz respeito à diferença encontrada entre esses "transportes" disposicionais para narrativas escritas e audiovisuais, pois cada um deles possui dimensões constitutivas distintas, o que demonstra que, assim como o "transporte" situacional é diferente em cada formato narrativo, também o é em sua modalidade disposicional. Por este motivo, a definição teórica do "transporte" disposicional passa a ser a tendência geral do indivíduo a ser "transportado" para narrativas escritas/audiovisuais, o que difere do conceito de "transportabilidade" (Harrington & Bielby, 2010) e o processamento narrativo é necessariamente imediato (Shrum et al, 2011), uma outra sugestão de pesquisa seria a repetição dos estudos feitos aqui em períodos regulares de tempo, o que talvez possa fornecer indícios de monitoramento dos padrões de comportamento dos fãs.…”