Fandom, Music and Personal Relationships through Media: How Teenagers Use Social Networks

Abstract

This paper analyses the practices and products of the One Direction fan community, focusing on the interaction of adolescent girls with certain types of texts present on social networks. We examine how adolescents approach music celebrities when they participate in fandom online and offline communities, supported by online social networks that rely on the use of multimodal semiotic resources. We adopt an ethnographic perspective, mixing narrative and analytical interpretations, and seeking to overcome the contrasts between them. The following results are discussed: first, we examine how teens admire particular celebrities and turn them into heroes. They value positively the fact that celebrities have an offline life and exclude possible constructed celebrities only supported by virtual reality. Second, social networks become frames of Fandom, Music and Personal Relationships through Media www.iaspmjournal.net 45 textual interpretation from which the meaning of multimodal texts are elaborated. Adolescent participation for building and understanding their heroes is related with different levels of activity, depending on their use of the Internet. Finally, girls move around fan communities in online and offline areas, both of them closely intertwined.

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“…However, because they see the rest of the crowd at the event as ‘us’, they interact with strangers differently (in terms of both quality and quantity) than they would do in mere physical crowds where there is no sense of shared identity or psychological unity (such as those at a shopping centre or transport hubs) ( Drury et al, 2015 , Hopkins et al, 2019 , Neville and Reicher, 2011 , Novelli et al, 2013 ). In addition, many of the people who attend these events are connected through digital networks outside the event itself ( Billings et al, 2017 , Lacasa et al, 2016 ), meaning that at each event there will be a number of other people that they already know, even if just as acquaintances. This creates the conditions for extensive interaction between people who normally belong to different social networks (e.g., geographically, occupationally).…”

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“…These interactions often result in spaces for community members to feel a sense of belonging, make inside jokes, and share experiences, online and offline. These social groups include, e.g., a community of music fans to bond over their common interests (Lacasa et al 2016), and groups uniting people over a collective social issue. For example, the #MeToo movement, used to bring awareness to sexual assault and its survivors, first gained traction on the connective network Twitter (Hosterman et al 2018).…”

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“…However, because they see the rest of the crowd at the event as 'us', they interact with strangers differently (in terms of both quality and quantity) than they would do in mere physical crowds where there is no sense of shared identity or psychological unity (such as those at a shopping centre or transport hubs) (Drury et al, 2015;Hopkins et al, 2019;Neville & Reicher, 2011;Novelli et al, 2013). In addition, many of the people who attend these events are connected through digital networks outside the event itself (Billings, Qiao, Conlin, & Nie, 2017;Lacasa, Zaballos, & de la Fuente Prieto, 2016), meaning that at each event there will be a number of other people that they already know, even if just as acquaintances. This creates the conditions for extensive interaction between people who normally belong to different social networks (e.g., geographically, occupationally).…”