Media Fandom

Media fandom is a term that came about in the late 1970s and is used to describe fans of stars from televisions shows and movies etc. It has been further extended to describe fans of computer and video games as well as science fiction.
Moreover, it is now said that:

“Media fandom has expanded beyond its original intent. Many issues such as community, space and identity are discussed and bring together many Internet communities who share common interests. Creating new links between cultural, media and Internet studies, media fandom began discussing the class, gender, nationality and sexuality of many television characters. It tries to understand and make meaning out of those characters by maintaining and creating online community relations”.

Karen Hellekson and Kristina Busse have written a noteworthy book on this matter entitles Fan fiction and fan communities in the age of the internet. The essays in this book talk about fans of Star Trek through to fans of Harry Potter and delve into the world of fan fiction. These essays consider the purposes of online communities for different fictional shows and stars and how they are created in the first place. Furthermore, this book considers the ways in which technological advancements have affected fan communities.

One of the most popular fan communities right now is for Game of Thrones – admittedly even I love this show and am a big fan! Fan communities for this programme have been created on Facebook, fanfiction and gamerhub. This programme gets an average of 32,000 new fans a day!!
Just take a look at the infograph bellow created by socialbakers:

 

(Image source) 

Peter Lang has also written a noteworthy book titled Digital fandom: new media studies. "Digital Fandom augments traditional studies of popular media fandom with descriptions of the contemporary fan in a converged media environment”. What this book does is show how changes in the study of fandom “can be applied in a larger scale to the study of new media in general, and formulates new conceptions of traditional media theories”.

Indeed, media fandom has changed considerably over recent years, advancing as a result of technological innovations.


References:
 
Chris Taylor. ‘Game of Thrones' Social Media Fandom: Bigger Than Westeros?’ URL: http://mashable.com/2013/04/04/game-of-thrones-social-media-fandom-as-big-as-westeros/

Questia. ‘Media Fandom’ URL: http://www.questia.com/library/communication/media-studies/media-fandom

Google books. ‘Digital fandom: new media studies’
URL: http://books.google.co.uk/books/about/Digital_Fandom.html?id=9LdS5WwGOvwC&redir_esc=y