Making space on the digital margin: youth fandom communities on tumblr as spaces for making the self and re-making society

Abstract

The role of online spaces in contemporary youth cultures is an increasingly relevant and vibrant topic of research in a variety of analytical and methodological traditions. This dissertation joins a growing body of work which explores the complex relationship between youth and emerging media through deep interpretive engagement with contextualized questions of meaning and experience. This approach recognizes the diversity of young people's interactions with the digital world and their agency in shaping those interactions. I herein present an ethnographic account of young people who are part of the fandom community on social networking site tumblr, a group united by shared appreciation for books, films, television shows, and other media texts. Their connections run much deeper than these interests, however, as does the meaning their engagement in this space holds for them as individuals and as a community. I explore, in turn, how their practices of friendship and community-building diverge from those expected on more popular social platforms more integrated with offline social life; how they experience and manage internet privacy in ways which respond to the specific social pressures they face as young people; their perception and construction of authenticity in online self-representations without explicit ties to verifiable offline identities; and their approaches to discussing issues of social justice and human rights outside the bounds of conventional politics. I ultimately situate my analysis within a larger context of childhood studies scholarship addressing young people's experiences of and responses to social and cultural marginalization. I argue that this community serves as a space of ambiguity and possibility in which young people can engage in forms of cultural resistance, establishing divergent ways of being better suited to their needs and priorities than those of their offline social worlds. The perspectives and experiences of the young people of fandom tumblr thus provide a window into the broader transformative power of digital youth cultures, encouraging us to consider the myriad ways in which young people use these emerging social spaces to shape their lives, their communities, and their world.