ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses fans and fan cultures, including key moments in scholarship on fans and fandom. It presents an arc of past and contemporary cases demonstrating how fan cultures, tied up within social media and other online communities and cultures, can often be located at the nexus of struggles for influence between media audiences and industries, revealing much about both. Specific fan cultures and phenomena discussed in the chapter are the Xena: Warrior Princess fandom’s early online influence on the television show’s production; the growing efforts by media industries to market to and measure fandom, and the “Clexa” controversy over the on-screen death of a queer character on the television series The 100. The chapter argues that fan cultures will continue to represent an important nexus of analysis in studying media phenomena in the digital age, and that attending to them through intersections of audience, industry, and the internet can provide particularly generative scholarly insights for the field of Communication.
