“True fan = watch match”? In Search of the ‘Authentic’ Soccer Fan.

Academics have created typologies to divide association football (soccer) fans into categories based upon the assumed ‘authenticity’ of their fandom practices. One of the main requirements of ‘authentic’ fandom has been assumed to be match attendance. The goal of this paper was to critically assess this assumption through considering how fans themselves talk about the significance of match attendance as evidence of ‘authentic’ fandom. In light of the fact that the voices of English non-league fans on the ‘authenticity’ debate have so far been overshadowed by the overbearing focus of much previous research on the upper echelons of English soccer, an e-survey was conducted with 151 members of an online community of fans of English Northern League (NL) clubs (a semi-professional / amateur league based in North East England). Findings revealed that opinion was divided on the constituents of ‘authentic’ fandom and match attendance was not deemed to be the core evidence of support for a club by 42% of the sample. Elias (1978) suggested that dichotomous thinking hinders sociological understanding and it is concluded that fan typologies are not sufficient for assessing the ‘authenticity’ of fan activities

Resolving identity ambiguity through transcending fandom

Identity construction involves accumulating cultural, social, and symbolic capital, with initial endowments being accrued through socialization into one’s habitus. This research explores the experiences of individuals that feel a lack of capital, which leads to ambiguity regarding their identities and places in the world. Through in-depth interviews, this interpretive research shows that such individuals may turn to fandom for gaining status and belonging. Fandoms are consumption fields with clear, limited forms of cultural capital. Through serial fandom and engagement with fandom in different ways, individuals were able to learn the skill of identifying and accruing relevant cultural capital. The skill became decontextualized and recontextualized, allowing individuals to transcend fandom and accrue general forms of cultural capital. Learning the skill aids individuals in dealing with the simultaneously debilitating and empowering freedom of contemporary consumer culture. Moreover, gaining cultural capital could be altogether developing into the form of the process we describe

Trivial and normative? Online fieldwork within YouTube’s beauty community

In this article, I discuss methodological understandings around qualitative research and online ethnographic practice to bring forward a reflexive account on the particularities of doing fieldwork on YouTube. I draw from a multiyear ethnographic examination of YouTube’s beauty community that sought to understand online popularity framed by local norms and practices and shed light into the local significance of knowledge, expertise, and self-development. I argue for an epistemological perspective that acknowledges the diversity of viable, conceivable fieldwork experiences while distancing from prescriptive modes of argumentation. I propose seeing fieldwork in and through its richness and predicaments, persistently naturalistic while interpretive. I approach online popularity, fandom, and even YouTube itself from a perspective that tolerates ambivalence, contradictions, and embraces the complexity of social worlds and human interaction

Technological Evolution or Revolution? Sport Online Live Internet Commentary as Postmodern Cultural Form

The coverage of sports has formed a key component of media content throughout the different stages of the development of communication technology. This article investigates to what extent the rise of online live text commentary of sporting events extends or departs from existing forms of representation in media sports, and thus whether it constitutes a form of technological evolution or revolution. The article argues that online sports commentary further advances the transnational distribution of sporting content and the rise of global sporting cultures, and thereby contributes to the globalisation tendencies of other electronic media such as television. At the same time online live text commentary in its minimal representation of the game event through facts and figures moves beyond the visual spectacle that has coined the televisual representation of sports, and thus requires modes of readership based on fan identification. Online live text commentary thus extends and alters the symbolic basis of sports coverage

On the Couch with Europe: The Eurovision Song Contest, the European Broadcast Union and Belonging on the Old Continent

This study explores the role of the Eurovision Song Contest (ESC) in creating and shaping European identity and belonging through an analysis of the affective bond television audiences have built with the largest and longest running pan-European media event. In reference to the ESC as an object of retained childhood media consumption, this bond is analyzed drawing on the notion of transitional objects in the work of object-relations theorist D.W. Winnicott and its adaptations in recent work on media consumption. The paper argues that ESC serves as space of both illusionary belonging, yet equally challenges the homogenous constructions of home and belonging prevalent in national identity through the disillusionment of a shared and negotiated cultural space, allowing for the formation of, borrowing Winnicott's term, a “good enough” Heimat that offers a dual space of belonging yet simultaneously challenges the horizon of expectation upon which such belonging rests