Gerrard, Y. (2017) It's a secret thing: Digital disembedding through online teen drama fandom. First Monday, 22 (8). ISSN 1396-0466
Abstract
Fans of teen drama television series often feel that their pleasures are unworthy, with many going to great lengths to hide their practices from certain people. Social media plays a key role in contemporary fan cultures, and so fans must navigate platforms' changing and complex norms around their users' identity in careful and strategic ways. These acts counter recent scholarly claims about the 'embeddedness' (or entanglement, enmeshing) of social media's technologies and norms within our everyday lives. In this paper, I explore how fans sometimes disembed, or detach from the logics of certain platforms to facilitate secrecy. My respondents disembed from: (1) some platforms' normalization of authentic identities, (2) social media's increasing naturalization of its own embeddedness within everyday life, and (3) platforms' demands that their users engage in often-risky practices of sharing. I draw on interview and social media observation data to examine how teen drama fandoms' devalued cultural status motivates my respondents to create secret identities on certain platforms, particularly Facebook Pages.
Metadata
Item Type: | Article |
---|---|
Authors/Creators: |
|
Copyright, Publisher and Additional Information: | © 2018 First Monday |
Keywords: | gender; fandom; social media; identity; sharing |
Dates: |
|
Institution: | The University of Sheffield |
Academic Units: | The University of Sheffield > Faculty of Social Sciences (Sheffield) > Department of Sociological Studies (Sheffield) |
Depositing User: | Symplectic Sheffield |
Date Deposited: | 14 Jun 2018 09:41 |
Last Modified: | 27 Jan 2020 10:58 |
Published Version: | https://doi.org/10.5210/fm.v22i8.7877 |
Status: | Published |
Publisher: | University of Illinois at Chicago University Library |
Refereed: | Yes |
Identification Number: | 10.5210/fm.v22i8.7877 |
Related URLs: | |
Open Archives Initiative ID (OAI ID): | oai:eprints.whiterose.ac.uk:132015 |