By the Fans, For the Fans, & For the Use of Fan Studies Scholars?

: Exploring Tumblr

BACKGROUND
In late June of this year I presented survey data to the Fan Studies Network [FSN], an international interdisciplinary
conference dedicated to academic examinations—conducted primarily through a cultural studies lens—of the
fandoms of celebrities, musicians, television shows, and movies. Seminal works in fandom scholarship were
published in 1992 (Jenkins, Bacon-Smith, and Lewis), but as the creators of the FSN state, “the influence of the
Internet and social media on fandom is now resulting in scholars questioning and ruminating on how these
platforms are presenting new challenges and how their influence can be understood” (Bennett and Phillips, 2013,
p. 52).

My FSN presentation extended ideas from a recent work I had published in the journal of ​Transformative Works
and Cultures [TWC] ​entitled, “‘Remember a Week Ago When Tom Hiddleston Could Do No Wrong?’: Tumblr
Reactions to the Loss of an Internet Boyfriend.” In brief, my article explored the ways Tumblr's uniquely featured
blogging platform provided the space—some posts extended beyond 600 and even to 2,100 words—the British
actor’s fans needed to react and subsequently analyze his “unexpected” relationship with Taylor Swift during the
summer of 2016.

When I proposed my topic to FSN, I intended to do a closer analysis of the Tumblr blogs I found while writing the
piece; however, as an internet researcher, I became more intrigued by the contrast of fan reactions across
different social media platforms. For example, when a Tumblr post about “Hiddleswift” was shared in a private
Facebook group that described itself as a place where “nothing is off limits,” the responses revealed tensions
between who is a “real” fan and who isn’t, as well as references to both Tumblr and Twitter as “toxic” places.
Wondering if that experience was typical, particularly on platforms that celebrate pseudonymity, I created an
IRB-approved 10-question anonymous survey to learn more about fan behaviors and internet preferences during
and since Hiddleston’s relationship with Swift. The survey received nearly 400 responses within the first 24 hours
of its launch, 593 responses in total, and the results that I shared were well-received by fellow fan studies scholars
at the FSN meeting in Cardiff, Wales. I came away with the impression that my work was of value, particularly to
current scholarly conversations about the authenticity of celebrity.

Then I went online.

There I found Hiddleston fans who presumably had participated in my survey because they were familiar with both
it and my name enough to 1) discover ​the live tweets​ ​from my #FSN2018 session which then 2) led them to search
for and read my ​TWC​ article, and ultimately 3) turn to the Anonymous Ask feature of a Hiddleston-focused Tumblr
blog run by pseudonymous user “insanely-smart” to interrogate both. These fans questioned the ethics of my
quoting from Tumblr blogs even though I had gained permission per the journal’s guidelines; my use of first person
in what they felt was supposed to be “proper academic writing”; and my “dissecting his [Hiddleston’s] every word
to find deeper meaning and inconsistency” (when, ironically, that is what they were doing to my writing). The
blogger “insanely-smart” did a good job of fielding questions about my work, urging the “Askers” not to conflate
the survey project with the journal article; however, the volume of “Asks” she received reveals a clear
misunderstanding of what academics who study fans do, especially if these academics are also fans of their object
of study.

This post-conference experience has inspired me to pursue a year-long sabbatical to better understand what
blogging is and can be today vis-à-vis Tumblr ​and​ to learn more about the methodologically eclectic nature of
fan studies.
RESEARCH PLAN
Having written my doctoral dissertation on how New Orleanians used blogs to offer recovery narratives that were
more dynamic than the oral histories published so soon after Hurricane Katrina, the affordances of the blog genre
are familiar to me. Since my 2010 dissertation, YouTube, Twitter, Instagram, and Snapchat have all functioned to
shape Internet culture so that brevity and images (both permanent and temporary) have become the norm.

Still, Tumblr remains one of the 50 most popular websites in the world. As Jeremy Gordon argues in ​“Let’s All Go
Back to Tumblr: A Reconsideration of The Last Great Blogging Platform,”​ “Tumblr [blogs] delivered the full,
unrestrained range of someone’s head — funny, serious, and everything else. There were a lot of people talking at
all different lengths about the subjects they wanted, which enabled another major appeal: the community” (2018).
With my sabbatical project’s focus on the use of Tumblr by and for fans, the community aspect is obvious, even
when​ ​those pages become echo chambers reinforcing a “particular viewpoint at the expense of a variety of other
types” (Booth, 2017, p. 236). While research on the relationship between Tumblr and fandom is still emerging, it is
often in the form of case studies of particular fan communities and fan/industry interactions, not on a meta-level
about the platform itself, although Paul Booth’s book ​Digital Fandom​ (2017) has described it as a place that
“revalues emotional activity" (p. 239) and “can become a site of critical discourse” (p. 240).

Despite the Anonymous Ask feature being added to Tumblr in 2010, the few times anonymity on Tumblr has been
mentioned in scholarly research, the focus has remained on the aesthetics and visual expression through the
reblogging of GIFs, videos, and static images, which fashion studies scholar Ehlin considers the “future of content
creation online” (2014). ​My project is the first of its kind that I’m aware of to investigate the Anonymous Ask
feature, and if awarded a sabbatical for the 2019-20 academic year, my preliminary research plans, for which I
will seek IRB approval, are as follows:

1. Distribute a survey to identify those Tumblr users who use their blog primarily as an Anonymous Ask
space.
2. Interview a small sample of those identified in order to learn the following:
a. Why and when did they begin to use the Anonymous Ask function?
b. Do they set rules for which Asks they will answer and/or not answer?
c. Do they (have to) post these rules?
d. How quickly will they move on to new topics if questions are repeated?
e. How much of a time commitment is it to stay online and answer questions, particularly during
times when the focus of the blog, e.g. celebrity, television show, or movie, is making headlines?
3. Interview fellow fan studies researchers to learn more about how they negotiate disciplinary and
institutional requirements with their personal, fannish ethics. I will also ask them how they approach the
relationship between themselves as researchers and the fans they research.
a. These conversations can begin online but will be more successful if I also attend future FSN
gatherings, both in the USA and UK, and participate in the Fan and Audience Studies Scholarly
Interest Group at the Society for Cinema and Media Studies conference.
b. I will need to reach out to speak specifically with scholars who have identified Tumblr as a site of
their fandom research and/or published work that tries to bridge the gap between fan studies
scholarship and fan communities.