hi guys! welcome to my cool Annotated Bibliography page. there are 3 annotated bibliographies on this page: 2 are of which are scholarly articles, and 1 is an interview from this class. my goal in all of these was to find answers to my inquiry of why people leave fandoms. I believe that these articles definitely help answer this question, especially “Ins and Outs of Transmedia Fandom”. if you have a few minutes, i'd definitely recommend reading this one, its pretty cool. These articles have been extremely useful for my main project (which can be seen on the 'project 3' page!)
Ackley, North. "Caroline Interview - Video game, Content creator, Childhood interest." ENGL 1007-78 Class Archive, 2024.
This interview is about Carline's fluctuating interest in My Singing Monsters, and what she thinks of the new generation of fans. She became a fan of the game when she was a kid, but after a while she began putting her time into other interests, up until recently when it was popular on Tik-Tok which reintroduced her into the game. She appreciates that the community is supportive of newer fans, and newer fans are supportive of older ones. She does note, however, that being a new fan now is different from when she was, as there wasn't as much of a social media aspect when she first played it.
From this interview, I learned about the community specifically within My Singing Monsters, which was not information I had before it. I believe that this interview will work well within my project because it shows how someone can slowly drift out, but also back into a fandom.
Fiesler, Casey, and Brianna Dym. "Moving Across Lands: Online Platform Migration in Fandom Communities." Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction, vol. 4, no. CSCW1, 2020, pp. 1-25, https://doi.org/10.1145/3392847.
The goal of this article was to find the causes and effects of fandoms migrating to different social platforms. To do so, they interviewed 28 Archive of Our Own users and ran a survey of nearly 2000 people. For the survey, they used a variety of both closed and open ended questions. The results of this research, however, may be skewed by the way in which it was obtained. By only interviewing users with more than 10 years experience within a fandom, and most of the survey responses coming from Tumblr, the interviews may not express the same ideas that a younger fan may have, and the surveys may be more skewed to the ideas of Tumblr users.
The results of these studies found that some of the primary reasons for migration are the contents, the features, and the values of the platform. The most common reasons cited for migration was when a new platform simply had better features or a better design than the current one, however on occasion users will also leave due to policy changes.
The article also touches on technical and social issues caused by migration. When a fandom migrates to a different platform, the content on the previous platform has a high chance of being lost. Within these fandoms (specifically for fan fiction), this content is very important and so this becomes an issue within these fandoms. When it migrates, it also can cause social issues within the fandom. Migration isn't an immediate process, which causes fragmentation in a fandom as some people are using the new platform while others are still with the old. In extreme cases, fandoms have died from leaving a platform without having a specific new one to go to.
From this article, I learned about this migration. I hadn't thought specifically about the ideas of what happens when a platform becomes outdated or otherwise unsupported by a community, and this article was very informative on this issue. I believe I can use the ideas of migration, and especially of the fragmentation caused by migration within my project.
Sundet, Vilde Schanke, and Line Nybro Peteresen. "Ins and Outs of Transmedia Fandom: Motives for Entering and Exiting the SKAM Fan Community Online." Poetics (Amsterdam), vol. 84, 2021, pp. 101510-, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.poetic.2020.101510.
In this article, the authors go through the full lifecycle of the SKAM community, from the beginning of the fandom to the end. The goal of the article was to both find the reasons why fans of the show joined and subsequently left the fandom, in addition to shed light on the experiences of fans while they were in the fandom. In this process, the authors interview numerous fans which give their own personal experiences. Many fans described being entirely engrossed in the fandom up until the moment it ended, only to enter a state of grieving for the show for weeks or even months after the show ended.
The conclusion of the article was that being a fan of SKAM was like being in love, but love can be tiring. Between interpersonal issues inside and outside of the fandom, most fans end up leaving the fandom with a bad taste in their mouth.
In reading this article, I learned significantly more about fans' experiences with both other fans and non fans of a media. In my upcoming project, I plan on using many of the conclusions made on reasons people join, stay, and leave fandoms as actions you can take and reactions within my game.