ABSTRACT
Introduction In 2010, Gibbons and Dixon issued a call to take football ‘fan interactions on the Internet more seriously’ (608). On an initial reading, this seemed like a call that should have been made at least ten years earlier: although the Internet has a rhizomatic history (Castells, 2001) the launch of Microsoft’s Windows 95 operating system in December 1994 was crucial in its production as, for the rst time, easy access to Internet Explorer through a desktop icon was made available. By 2010, the Internet had reached a state of some maturity – initial single-route communications of new media websites had been added to by the dialogically friendly communication a ordances of social media through the multitude of message-board forums, Myspace (launched in 2003), Facebook (launched in 2004; see Miller, 2011), YouTube (launched in 2005; see Burgess and Green, 2014), Bebo (launched in 2005) and Twitter (launched in 2006; see Murthy, 2013). However, their statement held some merit: Fuchs (2013) suggests that social science was not quick to accurately understand the signi cance of these developments and this argument might be applied to the speci c eld of the sociology of football alongside the wider disciplines at large. Indeed, the magnitude of what a desktop icon unlocked to multiple areas of life – even those traditionally associated to physical activity, such as football – was not immediately clear. The rise of GeoCities in developing this world beyond the desktop icon was pivotal in this as its pioneers, David Bohnet and John Rezner established the Beverly Hills Internet organisation which broke from the established ‘old’ media model in that consumers could develop their own web pages, rather than only reading the content laid out by journalists (Castells, 2001). Therefore the presentation of the Internet to the general public allowed new media spaces to develop (Gane and Beer, 2008). The distinction between new and social media is fuzzy, but largely coalescences around communicative capacities. So, ‘new’ media arguably democratised the reportage of events but social media deepened the communicative potential as it allowed Internet users greater capacities to co-construct the story through online dialogue. This opened up computer program possibilities and social networking sites began to appear.
