Soap operas and the history of fan discussion

Abstract

For decades, fans of U.S. soap operas have formed social networks surrounding their shows, and they did so even before the concept entered the vernacular. Soap fans, who started on a geographically local scale and built their communities through grassroots efforts, have found a variety of venues to connect with one another over the past several decades. This study looks at the pre-Internet development of these social networks to show how that trajectory relates to the current online community of soap opera fans. Although several scholars have studied soap opera fandom, few have taken an historical approach at understanding the trajectory of soap fandom, a view especially necessary in an era where online social networks are at the center of audience studies and where cornerstone U.S. soap operas are struggling to retain relevance and audience. To fill this gap, I argue that understanding fan networks today requires looking back to previous methods of fan networking. Soaps' longevity (the youngest U.S. soap is more than 20 years old) and frequency (all U.S. daytime soaps are daily) make them crucial texts in demonstrating how the roots of fan social networks in a pre-Internet era helped shape that fandom's transition onto the Internet, and they also illustrate the continued evolution of these networks as fans move online.

A life course perspective on fandom

“…Paul Booth (2008) analyzes MySpace profiles that fans create for media characters, arguing that media transformation engenders fundamental changes in identity formation and thus requires change in the study of audiences (see also Grodin and Lindlof, 1996;Sandvoss, 2005a). Moreover, larger issues of process in fandom itself have been studied, including the historical trajectory of US soap fandom since the early 1900s (Ford, 2008), the emergence and maintenance of community in online fandom (Baym, 2000), the explosion in fan fiction online (Hellekson and Busse, 2006), and the mainstreaming of fandom in the late 20th and 21st centuries (Gray et al, 2007).…”

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“…(Ford, 2008; Löbert, 2015). Gradually, from the 1990s to the mid-2000s, fan networking increasingly relied on online forums (Ford, 2008). After the mid-2000s, it shifted to social media.…”