Fan’s communities are mediate by cultural industries
The contexts involving young fans, whose activities are now inseparable from the Internet, are linked to social media, platforms, and culture of connectivity. Exploring conversations on social networks, analyzing big data, is an alternative methodology to get closer to fan communities.
Fans and micro-celebrities
We analyze how micro-celebrities are constructed through interactions with fans, mediated by the digital tools which have forced the traditional means of communication to evolve. We focus on OT, a classical show in Spanish Public television, This television program, the Talent Show, possibly inspired by the classical format of the “American Idol: The Search for a Superstar”, was forced to reinvent itself and with it the relationships between the fans and their idols.
We analyze the relationships between different social agents, measured by digital platforms. The results show that the followers of these micro-celebrities, the OT contestants, express personal, interpersonal, and community values in their comments and conversations.
In this framework, the most relevant issue is to what extent these values are introduced by the program producer and to what extent they are instigated from the opinions or practices of the contestants.
Fans and TV series
Skam is a good example to get a better understanding of fan practices around the TV series. It was broadcast on Norwegian public television. The young creator Julie Andem was commissioned to produce a series aimed at teens, focusing on their problems and concerns and using their own style of language
The fans’ activities around Skam are interpreted in a multiplatform context, which we conceive to be mostly a communicative environment. It is a fact that the conversations around Skam generate a set of data that travel through the social networks and to which their producers have access, and this may even lead them to change their scripts, depending on the interests of the fans. Platforms as Twitter, Youtube, and Instagram, or even the blogs which provide interaction between certain users, are inseparable instruments of fan communities and their practices.
Our results show that fan practices include interactions between fans, or with the producers, are mediated by multimodal texts. The interpretations and productions of the texts require the use of codes that go beyond essential resources of reading, writing, or oral language that were so common in fan communities mediated by analogous tools.