Fandoms — Communities of the Digital Age: Hybrid Culture in the “NearSports” Dimension

Abstract

The article is devoted to the consideration of actual trends in the study of fandoms as a phenomenon of the media culture expansion era, and in particular, fandoms related to sports. The intensive development of digital technologies has shifted the focus of fan studies to the forms of organization of fan communities/fan cultures that are born and supported by these technologies, providing radically new communication opportunities. The emergence of fandom as a particular subculture and the field of joint creative activities occurred among the fans of concrete stories and writers, television series, comic books and computer games, and became a bright phenomenon in the nearsports area. The implementation of group interests and needs using new technologies has created a special type of community - mediafandoms. The article examines how the key problems of fan studies are transformed in the digital society: identity problems, the relationship between the subculture and the dominant culture, the intersection of fan culture and mass/popular culture, cultural production and consumption. One of the attributes of fandom life - the so-called creative consumption, including such a form as "text poaching" - is under consideration too. Analysis of fan-creativity and its products (artifacts) reveals a tendency to hybridism, manifested in the erosion of the boundaries of sporting fandoms and their interchange with the creativity of other subcultural communities. The activity of fandom is considered in the perspective of the "gift economy" as an adequate model for describing gratuitous cooperation, creative production and distribution of fan products (which is typical for a large part of the fandom). Concerning the characteristics of sports / nearsports digital fandoms, we pay attention to their participants' "binge-watching", "expectation" and "foretaste"; the liminality of these communities because of situational/eventual inclusion of people who do not share subcultural values in general. Also considered the aggressive forms of confrontation with "others'/aliens' fandom” in the virtual space, the "hatedoms” formation which are generated both by the specific nature of this fan culture and, to some extent, by the competitive nature of the sport itself.