Fanfiction as a New Social Media, or For What Reason the Youth Write and Read Non-Professional Literature

Abstract

Fanfiction is the literary work of fans who use the plots lines and characters from their favorite work — “canon”. It arose with the advent of the Internet, because the Internet is the place where such works can be published and discussed. Assessments of this phenomenon are very ambiguous: from low-grade graphomania to a school of literary excellence. In any case, fan fiction is an important element of popular / convergent culture, including Russian, which has a noticeable socializing influence on its participants. The purpose of the study is to describe the specifics of fanfiction as a new social media in modern Russian speaking community. Objectives: 1) Characterize the readership of Russian-language fanfiction; 2) Determine the motivation of fan fiction readers; 3) Describe the nature of reader preferences; 4) Highlight the functions of fanfiction as social media and their implementation by Russian readers. Theoretical framework: G. Jenkins’ theory of convergent culture and M. McLuhan’s broad approach to understanding media. Empirical base — online survey of 1007 respondents, secondary analysis of fanfiction research data. Results. The main readers of fan fiction are young middle-class women living in cities and big cities; they study or work in the field of education, science, art and IT. The functions that fanfiction performs correlate with the functions of social media: first of all, entertainment, recreation and leisure, secondly, new emotions and new impressions. Combined with the opportunity to communicate with like-minded people, share your opinion or publish your own texts, fanfiction becomes a space in which each individual user plays important role in the concrete fanfic’s history. It reveals Fanfiction’s convergent nature. Directions for further research: studying the influence of stereotypical ideas about fanfiction on its development, analyzing the reasons for the ambivalent attitude of readers and authors of fan fiction towards cruelty, finding out the reasons for the gender homogeneous composition of the online fanfiction community.