See here.
There is, I have found, a difference between being a fan, being part of a fandom, and simply liking something.
The main aspect of being in the fandom, I feel, is the community: the willingness to associate with all those other strangely diverse beings who also identify as being in the fandom.
The main aspect of being a fan, distinct from being in the fandom, is the desire to do something about the show.
Mmhm, though I might add a third echelon:
[fan - fandom] – meta
fans don’t write (they do not contribute to the propagation of the discursive fandom)
fandom writes on cultural material (they propagate their own discursive formation and existence)
metaverse writes on fandom
The difference between fan[dom] and meta is that the former two aren’t necessarily “conscious” of their collective existence. Let me requote Gramsci…
[Culture] is the attainment of a higher awareness, with the aid of which one succeeds in understanding one’s own rights and obligations. But none of this can come about through spontaneous evolution, through a series of actions and reactions which are independent of one’s own will… .Above all, man is mind, i.e. he is a product of history, not nature. …The fact is that only by degrees, one stage at a time, has humanity acquired consciousness of its own value and won for itself the right to throw off the patterns of organization imposed on it by minorities at a previous period in history. And this consciousness formed not under the brutal goad of physiological necessity, but as a result of intelligent reflection (pp. 57-58).
Gramsci, Antonio (Ed. Forgacs, David), “The Antonio Gramsci Reader: Selected Writings 1916-1935,” New York: New York University Press, 2000
