Fan Identification Research Articles

Exploratory analysis of the role of mediatisation in the growth of transnational football fandoms in Africa

The development of football, together with its attendant fandom, has been synonymous with the development of the media industry. Globalisation has made European football more accessible across Africa, including in rural spaces where fan identities related to the games have emerged. The growth of satellite television and the evolving digital access to football have influenced glocalised practices and patterns of fandom among Africans in both rural and urban spaces. This explorative analysis explains the role of mediatisation in cultivating European football fandom across Africa. It builds an analysis of localised forms of transnational fandoms grown out of increased access to European football. Football reflects society and the paper argues that the exponential growing of transnational fandom across the continent mirrors ongoing mediatisation processes affecting all spheres of life in contemporary African societies. It shows that there are distinct, evolving and unique fan cultures based on following European football teams. Additionally transnational football experienced through the tri-cast platforms of television, computers and mobile phones has negatively affected domestic African leagues almost without exception. The paper utilised a desk research approach to explore how the process mediatisation can explain transnational fandom across Africa. The study calls for continued study of mediatisation and its effect on specific aspects of African society

Topic mining of real-time discussions: what catches the attention of live-streaming esports viewers?

ABSTRACT Research question To better understand esports consumer demand, this study derived topics from real-time viewer comments during live streams of two professional esports leagues, King Pro League (KPL) and CrossFire Pro League (CFPL). We investigated structural factors that drew viewers’ attention to each topic. Research methods Using data from Douyu.com, we collected 1,111,177 real-time comments on 126 KPL matches and 233,869 comments on 96 CFPL matches. We employed a digital ethnography approach to discern the fan identification of viewers who contributed to comments. We applied guided Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) to extract topics in these comments. We examined structural factors that affect viewers’ interest in each topic using a multinomial logit regression. Results and findings Only a small proportion of viewers who commented during live-streaming esports games were identified as fans of competing teams. Viewers paid most attention to the excitement of the game. Commentators and in-streaming activities also captured viewers’ attention. Esports fans tended to focus on players and teams whereas general observers were more attuned to game-related skills and knowledge. Implications We take the attention economy as a theoretical framework to understand esports consumers’ interests and demonstrate the structure of consumer demand for various aspects of esports. We provide insight to help esports organizations and live-streaming platforms effectively attract viewers.

Music Roles Affect the Selection of Consumption Means: A Questionnaire Survey of People's Expectations for Music and Exploratory Factor Analysis.

People listen to music for various purposes, and the roles that listeners expect from music can vary from person to person. In recent years, “subscription-based streaming services” (hereinafter referred to as “subscription”) have increased their share in the music market, thereby changing the way people listen to music. Though, the impact of this change on the role of music, is yet to be explored. This study analyzed survey data to reveal the relationship between the expected roles of music and the choice of music consumption means, including subscription. In particular, we obtained that a factor in the use of subscription is the expectation of constructing a personal identity. We also found that both purchase and live usage are affected by two factors: the expectation of fan identity construction and the expectation of artist contribution. This indicates that subscription is not an alternative to the existing means, but a new kind of consumption means in the music market. It was also found that subscription facilitates the construction of personal identity through music.Supplementary InformationThe online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s12626-022-00115-x.

PSM 기법을 활용한 프로야구 입장권의 가격 민감도 분석

This study is an exploratory study to establish a ticket price policy for Korean professional baseball. The purpose of this study is to focus on deriving the price sensitivity of the professional baseball spectators, and to examine how the price sensitivity differs according to the ticket demand factors and the characteristics of the spectators. To this end, by applying the Price Sensitivity Measurement(PSM) to understand the perceived intention to pay for tickets by professional baseball spectators, we empirically deduced the category of variable prices based on demand. As a result, it was confirmed that the overall price sensitivity for professional baseball tickets was low, and the higher the fan identity and satisfaction, the higher the IDP was formed. This study is significant in that it provides academic and practical implications.

“Do female anime fans exist?” The impact of women-exclusionary discourses on rec.arts.anime

This paper examines women-exclusionary discourses on the popular anime Usenet newsgroup, rec.arts.anime. By going back to pre-2000 online anime histories, this paper proposes to understand how women-exclusionary discursive practices on rec.arts.anime have contributed to shaping contemporary toxic technocultures’ discursive identities, as it is admitted that forum 4chan originated from online anime fandom. By using a data set of 252 messages related to gender issues posted from 1992 to 1996, I identify 7 discursive practices that I am theorizing here under the name of negative networking: 1. Blaming female anime fans for their lack of visibility; 2. Doubting the authentic interest of women in anime; 3. Mystifying the female anime fan; 4. Harassing female anime fans; 5. Criticizing the association of feminism with anime, both as interpretive practices and as scholarship; 6. Belittling female anime fans’ concerns; and 7. Denying or ignoring the challenges faced by female anime fans. I argue that the impact of these discourses must be understood as determinant in the establishment of the online anime hegemonic fan identity and its prediscourses, especially as they relate to the long-lasting marginalization of women and gender diverse anime fans.

The Relationship between Involvement, Fan Attraction, Fan identification and Fan Loyalty in Chinese Super Football League

PURPOSE This study investigated the relationship between fan involvement, fan attraction, fan identity and fan loyalty in Chinese Super Football League (CSL). METHOD Based on the background of Watching Chinese Super League matches in China, 319 fans of six football teams were surveyed online. RESULT The degree of first fan involvement has a significant positive effect on fan attraction and fan identification. Secondly, fan attraction and fan identification have significant influence on loyalty intention. Thirdly, the degree of fan involvement has no significant effect on loyalty, while fan attraction and fan identity play a significant mediating role between them. CONCLUSION In order to strengthen the influence of CSL, various policies should be formulated to strengthen the fan identity and fan attraction which affect the loyalty. In addition, policies to strengthen incentives and address constraints should be implemented.

“Action on the Game”: Sports Gambling as Fan Identity and Transactional Participation

This article describes Fox Sports’ depiction of sports gambling following the Supreme Court decision legalizing this activity at the federal level. The gambling personas offered by Fox Sports programming are particularly worthy of analysis, given efforts by media networks and sports leagues to rehabilitate the image of the gambler. Applying a critical discourse analysis of industry trade press, mobile app design, and sports gambling television programming, this article demonstrates how the persona of the “benign degenerate” is offered as a masculine fan identity designed to align gambling with more common social tv practices and interactive “transactional participation.” The introduction of this new sports gambling persona challenges previous depictions of sports gambling that have categorized this behavior as a form of financialized citizenship.

“That moment meant a lot to my daughter”: affect, fandom, and Avengers: Endgame

ABSTRACT This paper analyzes a viral Twitter thread from October 2020 in which Marvel fans debated the quality and political significance of a scene from Avengers: Endgame that highlights a number of Marvel’s female superheroes. Comments formed a complex reception matrix that used gender and affective reactions to the scene to construct political statements about the role of identity politics in popular culture. Many users framed supposedly rational, critical interpretations of the scene as inherently superior to emotional or affective responses, and posited that those fans who enjoyed the scene (often young people and women) were naïve and unintelligent. Some fans co-opted feminist language to criticize those fans who enjoyed the scene, which in effect framed fans of hegemonic identities (i.e., cishet white males) as the most proper and intelligent audience members. This paper uses theories of affect, gender, and feminist critique to analyze a sample of fan comments. This discussion shows how social media shapes both political discourses and fan identities.

How are fans affected by the commercialization of elite sports? A review of the literature and a research agenda

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to develop a holistic understanding of extant studies addressing the impact of commercialization on fans of elite sports.Design/methodology/approachIn doing this, the authors performed a structured review of 42 academic articles published between 1992 and 2020 that all focus on how fans respond and are affected by the commercialization of elite sports.FindingsThe structured review shows that the impacts of commercialization on fans relate to four different themes. These are (1) fan identity, (2) fan attitudes, (3) fan emotions and (4) fan behaviours. However, the analysis also shows that research within each category is largely scattered, and more research within each category is needed.Originality/valueThe paper highlights the complex and dynamic nature of commercialization. It presents a research agenda for future research and emphasizes a need to integrate the interests of several stakeholders when managing the impacts of elite sport commercialization.

Predicting the moral consideration of artificial intelligences

Understanding the moral consideration of AIs as moral patients is increasingly critical given their rapid integration into daily life and the projected proliferation of advanced AIs. We present the results from a preregistered online survey with 300 U.S. Americans on the psychological predictors of the moral consideration of AIs to develop psychological theory surrounding this phenomenon. We tested an array of psychological predictors inspired by the literature on human-human and human-animal relations: perspective (future orientation, construal level), relational (social dominance orientation, sci-fi fan identity), expansive (human-centric norms, anthropomorphism, global citizenship, openness to experience, techno-animism), technological (affinity for technology, substratism, human-AI overlap, realistic threat, identity threat), and affective (emotions felt towards AIs). The strongest predictors were substratism, sci-fi fan identity, techno-animism, and positive emotions. We also identified three conceptual dimensions of moral consideration with an exploratory factor analysis of eight moral consideration indices drawn from prior literature: mind perception, psychological expansion, and practical consideration. Additionally, the temporal existence of AIs impacted moral consideration: AIs existing in the future were attributed more emotional capacity and more value as feeling entities than were current AIs. These results illustrate nuances in the moral consideration of AIs and lay the foundation for future research.

‘Didn’t know she could shout that loud’: the performance of fandom among women followers of women’s golf

ABSTRACT While a growing body of evidence exists around women fans of men’s sport, less is known about women fans’ perspectives and identities in relation to women’s sport, and what is known tends to focus on homogenous representations of sports fans, rather than a diversity of fan types and follower styles. Building on the authors’ previous appraisals of the Solheim Cup – the biggest event in women’s golf – this paper examines fan performances of women at the 2019 event in Scotland. Twenty-five white women from the UK/Europe were recruited via social media before, during and after the Solheim Cup, with online interviews taking place in the following days. Using performative sports fandom as a framework, the authors seek to examine women fan performances at a major women’s sporting event. The analysis of the interviews resulted in three themes around (1) friendship, care and connection, (2) negotiated fan performances and (3) distinctive fan performances. While it must be acknowledged that this is a homogenous group of fans, it is hoped that this research will add to the understanding of the diversity and complexity of fan identities.

‘Maybe if she stanned …’: Reinforcing fan identities and affirming positive fan-object relations through toxic practices in K-Pop fandom

This article proposes an analysis of a specific form of toxic fan practice within Korean pop (K-Pop) music fandoms, discussing the role these toxic discourses play in the formation and affirmation of positive fan identities. The specific toxic practices that will be discussed occur in response to the personal tragedies of others, frequently where suicide or attempted suicide is involved. In particular, this article focuses on the ways in which certain K-Pop fans target the personal tragedies of others as a means of reinforcing a positive relation to their fan-object. Crucially, the tragedies these toxic behaviours are directed towards are not immediately related to the fandom or fan-object, and these aggressive fan behaviours are largely unprovoked. This ‘Maybe if she stanned …’ phenomenon serves to express the superiority of fan communities by asserting their distance from the suffering of others, as well as the redemptive qualities of their fan-object. I argue that these toxic fan practices function as a means of reaffirming the righteousness of a particular fandom, and this righteous toxicity is itself the result of the K-Pop industry’s valorization of an emotionally heightened form of fan devotion, as well as a changing online fan environment. In doing so, I hope to demonstrate how toxic fan practices arise as self-affirming meaning-making discourses within fan communities.

“¿Triste estás? I don’t know nan molla”

Abstract Fandubbing, or dubbing made by fans of any audiovisual product, is a linguistically and technologically sophisticated enterprise enacted by many devoted fans. This study presents the case of Miree, a 24-year-old fandubber with more than 1 million subscribers on YouTube and more than 300 multilingual fandubbed songs. Using a qualitative-interpretive approach, we conducted an in-depth interview with Miree and analyzed her top 30 videos by views to reveal how Miree performed fandubbing, how she expressed her fan identity through fandubbing, and which were some of the implications of fandubbing for language learning. Results show that Miree realized both interlinguistic genuine fandubbing and intralinguistic parodic fandubbing, strategically adopting translanguaging to orchestrate a multimodal performance, engage her fanbase, and activate several informal language learning opportunities and contexts afforded by fandubbing.

Exploring the Effect of Team Identification on International Students’ Adjustment to Higher Education in the United States

International students have been continuously transitioning to U.S. colleges in pursuit of high-quality education and social mobility opportunities. Multiple studies have dealt with the adjustment of international students in their process of transitioning to a new environment. The purpose of our study is to explore if college sports fan identification can contribute to this population’s adjustment process. This study used lived experiences from 10 international graduate students regarding their college sports fan experiences and how that helped them adjust to American colleges. Results showed that answers from international students derived two themes: social and academic adjustments. Social adjustment was specified as a sense of belonging and academic adjustment was specified as finding a way to relax from their academic burden. The results of this study can help both the international student office and athletic departments to utilize college sports to help international students with their adjustment to their new environments.

BTS for BLM: K-pop, Race, and Transcultural Fandom

This cultural report contextualizes K-pop group BTS’s history of engagement with Black pop cultural forms, to aid in assessing the significance of the group’s support for BLM organizations and anti-racist activism following the murder of George Floyd in the summer of 2020. While providing a counter-narrative to that of inter-ethnic antagonism that has been a feature of media discourse on Black-Korean relations in the US, since the 1980s, the report also provides an overview of the online organizing and protest strategies of BTS fans in the BLM movement, and the subsequent discourse about K-pop’s politicization that emerged in media coverage and on social media platforms; By bringing these accounts together, the essay aims to enrich our understanding of the political significance of emergent fan identities, while emphasizing the need for historical grounding in our discussions of race and transnational pop cultural phenomena.

Divergent Fan Forums and Political Consciousness Raising

This article conducts a thematic analysis of 40 threads related to sociopolitical issues on two <em>Divergent</em> fan forums, one on Divergent Fans and another on Divergent Wiki, to determine whether these forums raise political consciousness, especially among young people. As scholars of civic imagination show, popular culture narratives may lead to the ability to imagine a better future. Utopian narratives in particular facilitate this process in a dialectical way by presenting us with an impossible world, and dystopian narratives may operate in a similarly dialectical fashion by offering a negative example or warning. Analysis of posts related to utopia and dystopia, the story world versus the real world, historical and contemporary parallels, governmental reform, and non-normative sexuality reveals that participants on <em>Divergent </em>fan forums discuss real-world issues and sometimes imagine a better world, but this does not conclusively raise political consciousness. We can account for these civic successes and failures by considering Dahlgren’s (2009) six elements of civic cultures: knowledge, values, trust, spaces, practices/skills, and identities. While fan knowledge, trust, and spaces are strong, and fan identities can be experienced as relatively static, values and practices/skills are important areas for intervention to cultivate political consciousness among young people. Critical civic education at the secondary school level could foster democratic values, and teaching media literacy and political discussion skills could improve students’ ability to think critically about entertainment narratives.

Doing participatory fandom through trans‑scripting

Abstract This article examines trans-scripting in transnational, multilingual fandom on Sina Weibo, the largest Chinese microblogging site. Taking one of the most popular Korean pop music (K-pop) bands named BTS as a case study, 741 instances of trans-scripting were manually selected from a total of 18,243 comments under the official Weibo account of the largest BTS fan club in China. Combining online observation and corpus-based analysis, our study draws on the notions of engaged audience and affinity space to reveal how multiple patterns of trans-scripting are heavily mobilized by K-pop fans in translingual idol naming, the transcultural maintenance of fan-idol kinship, and the intertextual confirmation of shared media consumption experiences. We argue that trans-scripting is an under-explored linguistic strategy used by transnational pop-culture fans, providing an analytical lens for research on fan identity and fan-communal membership. Theoretically, trans-scripting can serve as a useful lens to analyze networked multilingual fandom.

Impact of Social Media on Intention to Purchase Pay-Per-View and Event Attendance: The Case of the Ultimate Fighting Championship

The Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC) utilizes a unique pay-per-view (PPV) product distribution structure, and relies heavily on social media to promote its events. Yet, no research has examined how UFC fans’ social media motivation influences their consumption. Using uses and gratifications theory and a mixed-method design, this study qualitatively explored the themes of UFC fans’ social media motivations and identified five themes (i.e., information, convenience, social interaction, entertainment, and economic). Based on these themes, this study developed the Scale of Social Media Motivation through quantitative analyses and further investigated how Scale of Social Media Motivation factors would affect consumption behavior by incorporating fan identification as a mediator. The findings revealed that the factors were positively associated with purchase intentions when fan identification serves as a partial mediator. Discussions are focused on utilizing the social media motivation factors and nurturing fan identification to promote UFC consumption.

Skating in the Sun

As the National Hockey League (NHL) has made concerted efforts in recent years to expand into the Sunbelt region of North America, its teams still face tremendous challenges to building up their fan bases. Adopting a qualitative research protocol, this study explored the phenomenon of NHL fandom formation in the Sunbelt region. Research findings revealed key patterns and trends that influenced individuals to become fans of NHL teams in this strategic region of growth. A discussion of socialization into fandom was developed based on the themes and assertions derived in the study, which suggested that the fan community would play a significant role in fan identity formation and be a major driving force in the league’s market penetration into new marketplaces. The findings offer practical implications for teams to build and expand their fan bases and also provide a foundation for future quantitative investigations.

Women who watch and support English football in Zimbabwe: a transnational analysis of female fandoms

ABSTRACT In this paper, we explore the lived experiences of women who watch and support English football teams in Zimbabwe. We utilized a qualitative research approach that included in-depth interviews and football ethnographies in spaces where English football is consumed such as bars, betting halls, upmarket clubs, restaurants, hotels, and sports clubs. The paper provides a nuanced analysis of how women become part of and participate in transnational forms of cultural consumption, in this case, English football. Other major themes outlined in the paper include how and where women consume English football, performance and practices of female fans. Firstly, from our observation and fieldwork experiences in Zimbabwe men make up most transnational fans. Secondly, the spaces where football is consumed especially public spaces are male dominated. The paper concludes that transnational fan identities are gendered in multiple ways.