Fandoms (w/ Dr. Paul Booth)

What are you a fan of? A band? Sports team? Show?

Fans, fandoms, and their creative engagement and output are ubiquitous...not just in popular culture. Experiences and brands also want to stoke fan-feelings among their users. But how, and does that even work?

To help us begin tackling these (and other) questions, we're joined by Cinema and Media Studies professor Dr. Paul Booth, who has written over a dozen books on fans and studying fandom, including his most recent, The Fan Studies Primer.

Dr. Booth dissects the differences between the "average consumer" and a fan, why subjectivity is critical to his work, and what we as user experience researchers can learn from studying fandoms.

Transcript

Paul:
We are led to study the things that we don't understand about ourselves. Right. And so I have always been a fan. I didn't know that I was, what one would call a fan. What I knew was, here's this thing that I really like as a teenager, and as someone in college, I started asking like, why? Why Doctor who? And not the million other things it could have been. Why, did my friends and I start a Star Trek club in high school, right. And not an X-Files club. Because we all liked the X-Files too. But what was it about this?

Ben:
Welcome to the People Nerds podcast, expanding your human centered practice with unexpected sources of wisdom. I'm Ben, joined as always by my colleague and friend, Karen. Hey, Karen.

Karen:
Hey Ben. We are starting a podcast.

Ben:
Yes we are. If you're listening to this, you probably know about our newsletter, which we strive to have curate some of the best theory and practice around design, product UX, CX insights, innovation, this great diverse community that is People Nerds. Please subscribe if you haven't already. But our community asked, Hey, could you do other forms? We want to engage with you in different ways.

Ben:
And so like the community, which is, as I just said, they're so diverse. It draws from a host of different disciplines, lots of different perspectives. It's what makes this human centered community so enjoyable to be part of. We wanted to broaden the aperture and share with you stories, perspectives, and thinking from folks you might not ordinarily hear from. Folks like artists, activists, museum curators, policy makers. Again, folks who might not necessarily I'm using air quotes here, do experience research in the way that Karen or I or you might think about it, but whose work and thinking can still apply and hold value for our own.

Ben:
So in this episode, we are going to be talking fans, fandoms and the impact of those communities. And Karen, this is a topic that you and I both hear a lot about professionally, but we also experience it in our personal lives too.

Karen:
Yeah, absolutely. Professionally speaking, I think that fandoms should be on all of our minds. And I think it is already on a lot of our minds, actually. The word fan, brand fan, at least in my experience has gotten thrown around a fair amount in my time as a UX researcher in the UX space, because we want our users to be engaged. We want them to be passionate. We want them to be fans of the brand. But for all that it's been on my mind and these are even questions I might have asked in a survey, I personally have never actually spent that much time really thinking about what the actual term fan means or what it entails or what its implications are.

Karen:
So that's on my mind professionally speaking, but I think that it has some personal resonance too, as a researcher. Because I'm a fan. I think we're all fans. It's one of the things we hear actually in our conversation is that fandom is nearly ubiquitous, right? Almost all of us consider ourselves to be fans of something. I know I'm a fan of Studio Ghibli animation. I'm a fan of folk music. I'm a fan of the Dark Soul series of video games. And Ben, you're a fan of watches. I want to say?

Ben:
Horology, Karen it's horology. Yes, I am a fan of not just watches, but time keeping. Atomic as well as quartz and mechanical. And I'm a fan of all forms of rap, trap, hip hop, drill, grind, any sort of rap based music. So yeah, it is. We hear a lot about it vis a vis brands. And I think coming out of, I use that term very loosely, coming out of the pandemic. A lot of these fandoms let us seek and find community. It gave us and you'll hear in this conversation, it gives folks a sense of identity that can often buoy them during certainly unforeseen and difficult times.

Karen:
Yeah. Yeah. And in a way it's almost a building block of our modern identities, especially as we're becoming more isolated in other ways, these sense of fandom and brand affiliation become all the more important. So with that, let's talk about our guest, because I think that he really helps us start to pick that apart and make sense of it.

Ben:
Yes. Karen, to help us begin, make sense of the fandoms landscape. We spoke with Dr. Paul Booth, a professor of media and cinema studies at DePaul university. He specializes in fandom, especially at the intersections of technology and culture. He's the author of more than 10 books on fandom, including the Fan Studies Primer, which was published last year. He also leads the virtual and augmented reality communication lab where he and his colleagues help people learn how to effectively and ethically communicate in VR and AR. He's a fantastic person for us to talk to about this. We're going to, as you're going to hear in our conversation, he talks Karen, something that you and I, about something that you and I were really queued in on. And that is the idea of the aca-fan, someone who themselves is an academic or is a professional researcher, but who might also take part in, have identities in, a particular fandom. What stood out to you from this conversation?

Karen:
Yeah, definitely that Ben, this idea of have of studying something that you also have a vested interest in, which I definitely resonated with me as a researcher, especially at Dscout. I love Dscout, I'm also a researcher here who's in charge of doing research about Dscout. So I think this idea of the aca-fan was super applicable in a way. I also, what really stood out to me was being able to talk actually about what defines a fan more formally in the field of fan studies as well as what defines a fan dumb and whether that's different than just a collection of fans. As well as the relationship between brands and the brand fans that invest in their property or their product and how commerce and capitalism kind of interact with this sense of community and passion that fandom often brings. There is a ton to dig into here. So I think we should jump into it.

Ben:
Welcome to Dr. Paul Booth. So happy you're here.

Paul:
Thanks so much. It's great to be here.

Ben:
And of course I'm joined by my colleague co-host and good friend. Karen Eisenhower. Hi Karen.

Karen:
Hi. So excited to talk with Paul today.

Ben:
Yes. As we said in our intro, we have lots of interesting things to cover about fandom., Fandoms fan communities, and then toward the end, we'll be discussing how industry researchers might make use of Paul and the work more broadly within fan studies. So Paul, I'm wondering if we could begin for the uninitiated, with a brief introduction on what fan studies is, what is that?

Paul:
Yeah, that's a great question. And gosh, if I had a good answer to it, I'd never have to write another word again, because I feel like this is the question that I kind of continually try and answer in all of my work. What are fans, what is fan studies? How do we look at all of these phenomena as they are changing? And as they kind of rapidly develop in our culture. I mean, to put it very briefly in the way maybe I would explain it in class. Fan studies, I don't mean this glibly, is the study of fans. It's a systematic way of understanding why and how people feel emotional engagement with media texts, celebrities, sports, musicians, and music, brands.

Paul:
Fan studies is a way of kind of bringing all of the research on people that have this sort of emotional engagement under kind of one umbrella. Under one roof. And I think what's really interesting about fan studies and why it's so valuable is that it doesn't neatly fit into any academic discipline. You have people who come from English, people who come from media studies, you have philosophers, you have sociologists, people who study economics, business, the people who study business. It all kind of gets wrapped up because fans themselves are touchstones for enormous amounts of cultural change.

Karen:
I'm curious, you're saying they're coming from all of these different... Everybody's coming from all of these different disciplines and sort of meeting in this crossroads in a way of all of these different ways of studying. I'm curious about where in that crossroads you are coming from, what if there is a particular discipline that you come from or bring to fan studies or a particular style of study that you like to do the most of?

Paul:
Yeah, that's great. My background is in media studies and I am in a media studies program at DePaul university. But I say that with an asterisk because none of my degrees are in media studies. I myself have come to this from a variety of disciplines. I have an English major from undergrad. I have a communication degree from grad school and I have a rhetoric degree focusing on digital technology. My PhD is in communication and rhetoric focusing on new media. And so I don't know if there is a fan studies major anywhere. I know DePaul has a fan studies minor, but it's not a codified discipline. It's bringing all of these disciplines together. So my particular interest in fan studies, I'm very interested in two things. I guess. One, is how people form communities, like what makes a fandom as opposed to a collection of fans.

Paul:
That's kind of the first thing I'm interested in. And the second thing I'm interested in is... I guess there's three things. The second thing I'm interested in is how fans use technology and that ties into the new media, the digital technology stuff. And then the third thing that I'm interested in is kind of how fans use their emotion, their affect to enact change in the world, to try and make the world a better place. And I think we often see fans using their emotion to make the world a worse place in a lot of respects. But I think it's also important to take time out and say like, there are really good things happening, and point those out too.

Ben:
I'm I'm wondering if we could go a fan sort of question about your interest in fandom. Do you have a quick, or not fully Marvel Cinematic Universe description of your own genesis to getting into fan studies? Were you always someone who found himself in fandoms, a fan of things? How did you become interested in the scholarly study of, or systematic questions around what it means to be a fan or a part of a fandom?

Paul:
I've always been a fan. I've always loved media and particular media. I've been a fan of Doctor Who since I was four or five years old, I've been a fan of Star Trek since I was about that age. But I didn't know that what I was doing was being a fan of things. What I knew was, here's this thing that I really like. And as a teenager, and as someone in college, I started asking, why? Why Doctor Who? And not the million other things it could have been? Why did my friends and I start a Star Trek club in high school, right. And not an X-Files club, because we all liked the X-Files too. But what was it about this? I didn't have the language, the academic language at that point to say, oh, there's fan studies, right? We should look at that.

Paul:
And what ended up happening was in my PhD program, I was coming up to my dissertation and I looked... You do what you do and when you're writing a dissertation, which is try and save as much time as possible. So I looked at every piece of writing, every final paper I turned in for the past four years. And I think 90% of them had something to do with cult media and fandom and people, and people who feel and act upon their fandom. And I didn't realize that I had done this. It was this bizarre moment where I was like, I'm obsessed with this. And I had no idea.

Paul:
And what happened was I went to my advisor and I said, how do I put all this together? And she recommended, I read Textual Poachers by Henry Jenkins, which is kind of the classic fan studies text. And I did. And then I was like, oh, I've found my home. This is asking and answering the questions that I have been asking and answering obliquely for the past 15 years. When I had a name for it I was like, oh yeah. But I think ultimately, it is just an exploration of that five year old who decided to stay up late watching Doctor Who and what compelled him to do that. And I don't know if I ever will have an answer to that, but I'm glad that I did.

Ben:
You know, Karen and I were talking before this episode about the ubiquity, it seems check us here, with fandom. One of the big reasons we wanted to have you on not only because your academic interests are so purely foundationally interesting, but it seems like we're hearing a lot more about fans. That to your third interest, they're engaging in different ways. I'm wondering if we could try to get an operational definition. I have a sense that you might parry and dodge with me here, but do you have a working definition of a fan, or as you said in your interest, number one, the nuances between person who claims to be a fan and then communities of folks comprising fandom. Can you set some definitional boundaries or sketch out any sort of known knowns in fan studies?

Paul:
Shockingly, I think I can't Ben.

Ben:
Yes.

Paul:
Because what, and I'll preface this by simply saying, in my experience, every person who studies fans has a different definition of what makes a fan. And I think that's good. I think that's a strength of the discipline is that it doesn't attempt to definitively answer anything. It instead gives us opportunities to explore the prism of humanity. And through that, we learn about ourselves. But I can tell you what my definition of a fan is.

Ben:
Please.

Paul:
I subscribe to the belief that a fan, anyone can be and is a fan of something. Because fandom to me is anytime you have an emotional engagement with something outside of yourself, that causes you to act in some way. That inspires you to act in some way. And that's very vague and deliberately so.

Paul:
Traditional fan studies would say, okay, so you really like Star Trek. So you're going to act on that by writing fan fiction or going to a convention or getting an autograph. But I also think an act can be a very small thing. It can be, I'm going to set aside an hour to watch this, right. I'm not just going to turn the TV on and whatever is on, I'm going to watch it, right. I'm going to deliberately do that. And I think in an era of streaming that is even more important, there is such a glut of stuff out there. What I choose to spend my time watching is an act. It is a deliberate act. So among that there are levels and of engagement and levels of fandom. I don't think someone who is simply turning on the television and deciding to watch Star Trek Picard is maybe as engaged in fandom as someone who goes to a convention.

Paul:
But I think they're both related to being a fan. I think that is something related there. And you bring up a kind of larger point, which is this idea that we can't escape fandom today. It is all around us.

Ben:
Yeah, it is.

Paul:
There is no. If young Paul Booth had been growing up in this world, I would've had a name for what I was. Right. I was growing up in the eighties. Pre-internet, didn't know anyone else that watched Doctor Who. I thought I was the only one. I didn't have a way of connecting with other people, but if I was growing up now and I could go online, I could find fan communities. I could have a name for myself. I could know a history of fandom in a way that I couldn't have 35 years ago. But so partly the internet has made fandom ubiquitous.

Paul:
Everyone can call themself a fan today because they can recognize that emotion in themselves, that passion in themselves. I also think our culture for all of its faults, and there are numerous, but our culture has become more accepting of emotional engagement. And that to me is a really positive and powerful thing. I think about when I was growing up and kind of tacitly through the media being encouraged, certainly as a man, to not feel things or to not express emotions. And then to suddenly be faced with, not only like this show that I love, I want to emote. I want to tell people about it. I want to cry. I want to laugh. I want to do all these things. And I don't see that same hesitation with my students today. I don't see that hesitation of like, if they love something, they're like, screw it. I love it. Let's go with it. And I marvel at that because it's wonderful. So I think that's another reason people aren't ashamed to have strong emotions about things, about media and celebrities. It's like almost encouraged.

Karen:
My question for you is this definition of a fan as sort of being this engagement, it's sort of a behavioral thing, right? Like a bit engagement and action. I'm curious if and how community comes into that definition. And particularly, I think earlier you said something along the lines of there being sort of a difference between a collection of fans and fandom. And you've already provided us with such a spectacular definition of fan. I'm wondering if there's a corollary definition to when does this tip and become a fandom as opposed to a collection of people that like things.

Paul:
I think we throw around the term fandom, willie nilly, like scattering rice at a wedding. It's just like, that's a fandom and that's a fandom where Oprah on the couch, you've got a fandom, you've got a fandom.

Paul:
And in some ways I think that's detrimental to fan communities that take their emotional engagement as part of their identity. And I, this is just kind of speculation on my point. I haven't done research into this particular question, so I don't know for sure. I was having this conversation in class with my students last night, you can't quantify it, but there is a difference between a group of people who just really like going to see Marvel movies, calling themselves a fandom. And people that have been watching and studying and reading Marvel for years. For me personally, I don't think there's any wrong way to be a fan. I don't think there's any wrong way to be in a fandom. I think if you are engaging in some way, and you're enjoying it and you're not hurting people, that's great, more power to you.

Paul:
But I think in our culture, there does seem to be a difference. That's hard to quantify. How do you measure emotional engagement with something? How do you measure that? And so I think a lot of the toxicity that we see in our kind of fan communities today, stem from this idea that this object that is so important to me, it is a part of my identity. It's a part of my personality. It's part of who I am. And then other people are claiming it as part of theirs that haven't done the same amount of introspection and the same amount of work. And again, I reiterate, this is not my perspective. I don't think there's any wrong way to be a fan. But I can understand where that toxicity comes from, where emotional engagement becomes quantified or becomes... Not quantified. Becomes hierarchical in some ways.

Paul:
And maybe this is a product of living in a capitalist society where we always measure our success based on other people's failure or other people's losses. But fandom is not a zero sum game. And fandom is not a pie where we're splitting off pieces to feed to everyone, right? Fandom is making more pie. Fandom is, there's pie for everyone, right? That's what kind of strikes me is, I think a fandom shares an identity. It shares a collective sense of self. Whether or not the people in that fandom know each other, they all feel like they're part of a club.

Ben:
One of the things that we think about a lot with the People Nerds community are the methods by which we seek to build knowledge around, maybe seek truth. If there is such a thing as truth in fan studies. And both Karen and I were struck by the aca-fan, which is the portmanteau, of the academic and fan. I'm wondering if you might briefly describe or define that and talk about the implications for being someone who is a fan potentially themselves of the thing that they are curious about and interested in studying.

Paul:
This is a great topic. The aca-fan is a surprisingly controversial concept in fan studies and in academia in a larger sense. I think, so to back up a little bit, the aca-fan is a concept that kind of got popularized in that original book that I mentioned Henry Jenkins, Textual Poachers, which was written in 1992. So the kind of primary text that fan studies has used is both older than you think, but also much more recent than you'd think like at the same time, which is weird. But Jenkins talks about being an academic, which certainly in the nineties, but even today is generally seen as someone who should be very objective, who should remain distant from the thing that they study. The stereotype of the kind of bespeckled ethnographer, watching a group of people through pair of binoculars. I can't interfere, right.

Paul:
Versus being a fan and being so emotionally close to the material that one thinks they might lose objectivity. One thinks they might lose that sense of separation. For me, I find the aca-fan positionality to be a strength. And I think that for a couple of reasons, whenever I've done ethnographic work. And so a lot of my work is textual analysis. I often look at what fans are writing or doing or producing, but I have also done quite a bit of ethnographic work where I interview fans often at conventions. Or I've also done some survey research, which has led to kind of online interviews about things. In every instance, when I talk about my own fandom, the fan that I'm interviewing feels more comfortable, opens up more, feels like they understand my position better. I think there is an inherent fear in fan communities that academics are going to come in and point out all of the weird things that fans do. And everyone will laugh at them, because that has happened a lot. It has happened a lot in fan communities.

Paul:
And so if I can say I'm a fan too, even if it's... When I did one interview, I wore like a pin, a Doctor Who pin. And that was a way to bring up conversation points. And it even just something simple like that, they knew that I was not going to be making fun of them. I was actually interested in something specific. And the second reason I think aca-fandom or subjectivity in academics is important is because objectivity is a fallacy. It's impossible to be objective in any sense, because we are all coming at our research through our own perspective, through our own worldview, through our own ideologies, our own histories. Most of the academics I know who have picked their subject did so because they like it.

Paul:
That's already tempering their research with emotion. The things that they choose to study in that a Shakespeare scholar study Shakespeare because they like Shakespeare. And so to pretend otherwise, to me is dishonest. Own it. I like Shakespeare, right? I want to study Shakespeare because I get something out of it. And here's what I get out of it. What that does is, it doesn't pretend like there is some answer out there. Some ethereal godly answer that an academic is somehow plucking from the heavens, saying here is the truth.

Paul:
Instead, answers and information and research is generated from the bottom up. And what we get, the more scholars are researching something. We get these multiple perspectives, which is to me, the exciting thing. I don't want an answer. I want every answer. And so that's what fan studies gets me is like, I want to read the Doctor Who scholarship from Doctor Who fans, who don't like the same doctor that I do or whatever. Right. Because then I learn from them. I don't just get repeated ad nauseam the same bit of information. So in academics, aca-fan kind of represents this, maybe shift from objectivity. That is very, I think, dangerous to a lot of academics who have put a lot of stock in being objective, but I don't see how you can live in the world that we live in and think objectivity exists.

Karen:
But I guess I'm curious, do you run into sort of, I don't want to say naysayers, but people who hold the opposite opinion, that objectivity is the name of the game and aca-fans represent something less than positive. And if so, how do you sort of respond to that in your work or work around it or address it in your research?

Paul:
Yeah, yes, the very short answer is absolutely. I think the dominant paradigm in academics is to think objectivity exists, is to think that one can be objective. And so, yeah, you do face that. I think about when I went up for tenure and I faced the gauntlet of... At DePaul, it's seven. I think it's seven people from around the university when you reach your final interview stage and they've read your file, but they all come from different, wildly different parts of the university. It's scientists, it's business people, it's people from around the university. And that was a question. I mean, that I got in my tenure interview. Yeah. At that point, I think I'd published six or seven books.

Paul:
I'd had great teaching evaluations. I was obviously well known in fan studies as an academic. And I got a question like, why do people do this? Like, what is the point of fan study? So it's something that you just, as a fan studies scholar, this sounds really terrible when I say it out loud, you get used to answering that question. You get used to answering, why does matter? And it, in a lot of respects, it depends on the person you're talking to. So if I'm talking to a business person, why does fandom matter? Why bother studying it? Oh, because fans are in a huge consumers, 80% of the things that people buy are by 20% of the fans. Hmm. Or something like that. Wait, I can't remember what the numbers are, but like, there's a small percentage of people who buy the most stuff. Because they are emotionally engaged. So yeah, of course that's why we study fans.

Paul:
Or to the biologists. Why study fans? Well, I mean, fans are a kind of community and communities help form new ways of thinking about the world. And you just kind of figure out who you're talking to and try and speak their language. And I think that maybe that I'm just kind of riffing now, but to maybe that's part of what studying fans has taught me, is that in order to be part of a group, in order to understand a group, you have to learn that group's language.

Karen:
Hey, it's Karen. And now a word from our Scouts. Welcome to our mini segment, scout sound off where we use Dscout express, our quick turn qualitative survey tool to deliver thoughts and opinions straight from our participants to your ears about the topic of the day. Today's topic, of course is fandom. So we sent a survey out to our participant pool, asking them about their fandoms, about what being a fan means to them, and about what fandom has added to their lives. Less than a day later, we had 50 video responses from sports fans, sci-fi nerds, hobbyists, you name it. So we picked some of our favorites and put them together to share with you today. So without further ado here is the scout sound off on fandom.

Speaker 5:
To be a fan to me is to be completely committed.

Speaker 6:
I'm not just a fan like, oh, I like it. I watch it. once in a while, I'm in it all the time.

Speaker 7:
That just has added so much value to my life. I've gained new friends, just due to being a fan. And I've really had some great times created wonderful memory.

Speaker 8:
Highest of highs, the lowest of lows. There's such a fandom out there. There's such a community.

Speaker 9:
The atmosphere, the culture, the comradery, the passion that it brings out of me and out of the people that watch it with me. I can't say that I've been obsessed with anything more, and I'm more than happy to be obsessed with this.

Karen:
And that's the scout sound off for the week, if you're interested in running quick express missions like this, diary studies or one-on-one moderated interviews, check out our platform at dscout.com. And now back to Paul.

Ben:
And we're back with Dr. Paul Booth, Paul, you have been talking with us about fan, fandoms, the behavioral elements of, the modes of production, the digital engagement, all of these things are relevant to industry researchers. And before we hit break, you were talking about your tenure committee and trying to advocate for your approach to knowledge generation and methods to folks who might study and be interested in business.

Ben:
And I think you made a really good case. You were trying to say that 20% of the people account for like 80% of the profits. And I think that's a really nice pivot to the space wherein Karen and I live, play, think. Wherein folks are trying to generate empathy for via research or research practices, trying to generate empathy for users of products and platforms. And the subtext for a lot of those conversations is, gosh, we'd really like to make fans out of our users. How do we make people who use, and then, I mean, fill in the blank. People who use product management software, people who use an app, people who certainly subscribe to a streaming platform, how do we move them from quote, unquote, regular users, someone who is again, a casual consumer, how do we push them to a fan?

Paul:
As you might suspect, it's a thing that academics certainly of my liberal studies tradition, often try to qualify or push back on a little bit, I think. Because fandom predates business. And so the idea that a company or a business is going to generate fans, I think is a product of the world we live in. Kind of, as you were saying everyone can be a fan today and everyone calls themself a fan today. And it absolutely makes sense that a company would want the sort of engagement that fans do to intellectual property with their products.

Paul:
The flip side is of course, that intellectual property is also a business. That it's intellectual property. And so it's creative, but it's also about selling things, right? Disney is in the habit of selling things and it sells not just the films and the television shows, but actual products. So the pushback in kind of fan studies communities against the corporatization of fandom, I think is the term you might use, or the term you might see. Is often, I think it forgets that the property part of intellectual property. And fans for a very long time worked almost entirely outside of the kind of capitalist structure. So fans write fan fiction for free. Fans, distribute it for free. Fans, make vids for free. Fans, help each other out. Fans work together. It's a cooperative, it's a commune.

Karen:
My first question is actually following up on something you said, which is this intellectual properties are in fact properties and in our sort of modern, late capitalist world, everything's being bought and sold all the time. And so I'm sure that these major media corporations must be aware of and perhaps intentionally engaging with in some way, the fandoms that spring up around them. And I'm curious what that tends to look like if you take... Yeah. One of these large media corporations who is pumping out intellectual property, producing it, what is the relationship between them and the fandom around it? And how has that evolved?

Paul:
I think that Karen, that is an absolutely key question. How corporations, intellectual property corporations have understood fandom and how it has developed. I think a really instructive example of this is Warner brothers, when Harry Potter came out. So Harry Potter huge, right? Obviously. And then tons and tons of fan work. It's the dawning of the internet era as well. So we're seeing tons and tons of websites of fans writing their own fan fiction and exploring all the themes and developing what they're seeing in Harry Potter. And at first Warner brothers is like, whoa, hands off. This is ours. And then they took a step back and they're like, wait a second. We are actively scaring off the people that are going to be loyal customers for the rest of their life. And so they flipped and then they said, we are going to completely turn a blind eye to any of this for the most part we're hands off.

Paul:
And what that did was it allowed this fandom to flourish, which just encouraged more and more people to consume Harry Potter. So they found by allowing fans to emote and express themselves, they actually developed a stronger bond with the fandom. And that really helped it kind of develop over time. I think the danger is, if fandom only becomes about consuming things, then it runs the risk of becoming just another kind of corporate entity. It needs to be separate. It needs to have a kind of central core of creativity and bottom up generated enthusiasm to be vibrant, to create those things that a corporation won't create or to have kind of new ideas.

Paul:
It's also, I think fan communities push back against what they see in media texts that are old fashioned or offensive. They encourage them to be better. They encourage them to grow and change through dialogue, through fan fiction, through interacting with the media corporation. So I think... And that only happens if there's a good line of communication, which wouldn't happen if a corporation shut them down.

Ben:
So like Karen and I work with a lot of innovative companies in the People Nerds community, and those companies, I think, check me here, Karen, who I believe have fans are those who do the sort of relational building that you're describing. Wherein they recognize in their community of users that there's really good ideas that can improve the product service thing in a way that like, again, Warner brothers is like, huh, this, this particular, this fan fiction, or this, this art that is being created can inform the art that we want to ultimately create. And so like in that example, you've got where it stops being one way wherein, and now we can have a discussion about the extent to which as you alluded to, it's extractive. The very innovative companies that we work with, or that we spotlight.

Ben:
They don't just do evaluative research where they're like, okay, two different logos, two different buttons, two different apps, which one do you like more? They start earlier and they do more of this formative, generative... How might you, what are you doing instead of? We know we're not helping you do all this sort of work or all these sorts of needs. Are there things we could be doing more?

Ben:
Those are sort of open ended wherein maybe a fan again, Karen and I were talking about the roles of like loyalty, consumption. And then importantly for, it seems like for a lot of UX user experience researchers, whether or not they'll be the evangelizer. Whether or not they'll go to their friends and family and say, oh my gosh, you have to use... Just like a fan of any other media or, or text or art would say, oh, if you haven't seen, if you haven't consumed X, you have to.

Ben:
So not exactly a question, just a remark about those different kinds of research, at least in the industry world and how the companies who do more of those earlier stage research, ask those sorts of questions, Paul. And like essentially trust the people who they might call fans. Those seem to be the ones that are, have more loyal fans, followers, users.

Paul:
I would simply say, I think what's useful about using the term fan in that particular case, is that you're giving an identity to somebody that encourages them to act in a particular way. So if I'm selling a widget and I want someone to evangelize for my widget, if I call them, Hey fans, Hey, widget fans, widget heads, right? Come on over here. And help me make this widget better. You're encouraging them to act in a particular way because we have this kind of cultural conception now of what a fan would do. Whereas I don't think you would get that if you just went out there and said, Hey, who likes widgets?

Karen:
I do think that's one thing that we see a lot in our industry is somebody's like, okay, we want to figure out if someone's a fan of this brand. So here are the five metrics that we need to track. Like how often are they engaging with this thing? Like, are they just watching or are they commenting? And I, there may be some, I'm curious to hear, like, is this something that's attempted to be quantified in your field? Or is it more of a qualitative pursuit? But I suppose on top of that, I like this idea of maybe instead of trying to purely quantify it, behaviorally that it's something that can actively be cultivated almost through the active research.

Paul:
Yeah. I would say the majority of fan studies research is qualitative. And the quantitative research... The trouble with quantitative research when you're measuring something like an emotional engagement, is that it's really good at looking at the things that it's looking at, but it's not very good at looking at the things it's not looking at, which it's the trouble with any sort of quantitative research. Right? You can get a really good measure of whether someone is commenting and how much they're commenting. It's a lot harder to ask why, and it's a lot harder to ask, well, what else are they doing? And so the danger of that is fandom becomes defined by the things the researcher is investigating, as opposed to a kind of qualitative observation.

Paul:
Here's what fans are doing. Here's what's going on. I'm not saying qualitative research is better than quantitative research, but it finds different things. If you're looking for the breadth of things that, and ways that fans define themselves, and the ways that fans act. To me, qualitative research finds that because you go out and you look for it and you ask people and you observe what's going on. Measuring what people are doing is going to tell you a lot about what they're doing, but not a lot about why they're doing it or what else they're doing.

Ben:
So many of the folks who engage with People Nerds content are from, I would say that methodological and epistemological, predilection preference. They are often tasked with adding the why to the robust, what that so many of innovative techy companies have. There're lots and lots of data, and they can often not say why a thing is happening. And that's where qual is called upon. If a company came to you and they said just what I was saying, there, we have tons of how and what data, we know a lot about what our users and customers are doing. We're trying to figure out how we can turn this activity into, or harness or tap into or understand if there are fans in for our brand, or if there's a way we can make a fan out of our brand or service or product.

Ben:
Is there something that you're seeing companies... Again, think about your own life, Paul? I mean, you're not just a doctor who, and just a Sherlock Holmes fan, you ostensibly have a computer. I mean, we're talking to you on one and maybe you really like that computer, or maybe you have a phone, or maybe you use a, I don't know, a kitchen gadget. Is there something that businesses do for you, Dr. Paul Booth, professor of fan and studies that you might extrapolate. Granted knowing that as a qual scholar, you're focused on the subjectivity and the reflexivity, lots of caveats.

Paul:
Ben, I've spent 30 years of my life studying why I'm a fan and I still don't have an answer. So looking at kind of what companies do. Okay. So I'm sitting right now. I'm sitting in my basement, which is also my game room. And I'm surrounded by all of my board games. I'm right now, I'm a big board gamer. That's a huge part of my identity. And it's connected to fandom. And I'm thinking about what is it that board game, there's a particular board game company that I really like. If they put out a game, I'm going to get it. I won't even research it. I'm just going to get that game. So here's a business that is very niche. And we're talking like expensive games, 150 bucks, right. We're not talking like monopoly down the street.

Ben:
Okay.

Paul:
What are they doing that makes me want their game. One, this goes without saying, their games are good. Every game of theirs I've played, I've really, really enjoyed. Having a quality product will attract people. Two, they're very well made. And they aren't flimsy. They hold up, they're repeated use. I know that this is very obvious kinds of things, but I'm in thinking about my own fandom in this particular way. I'm kind of trying to unpack it from the very beginning. They look good on my shelf, right. But I mean that they, like when people come down here, they're like, what's that? Tell me about that. Right. There's an aesthetic sense to them that encourages me to share them.

Paul:
And I think they've tapped into an already built board game community. I don't know if they have, I mean, I know that there are Reddit threads and there are communities built around this particular brand. Around this particular creator of games. That they have tapped into. And they respond to feedback on [inaudible 00:51:25]. They interact with fans on Twitter. I don't interact with them. I don't post things, but I see it. And that makes me feel like they are engaged in their product, that they want their product to be the best that it can be.

Paul:
Yeah. I mean, I don't think any of that is particularly groundbreaking, but if I think about all of the products, all of the things that I might evangelize about... It's about quality and aesthetics and a belief in the product. Trust in the consumer that we don't need to make this... We don't need to bullshit you. That this is a good product that just does a good thing. I mean, I think it, having that point of view, I think is important. I like a company that has a point of view that is not trying to appeal to everyone. I don't want a company that is going to suddenly, I don't know... Democrats are in power, so we're going to support gay marriage. And suddenly Republicans are in power and all of a sudden we're going to throw out math textbooks.

Paul:
Right. I like, I'm not a huge fan of Disney as a corporation, but I'm really happy that they took a damn stand right. And said, here's what we believe, because that lets me know when I go to Disney, I'm supporting them. Or if I don't believe that I can say, I don't want any part of this. It gives the choice to the consumer. Right. I have more information. I don't know if I'm tacitly supporting a belief system that I disagree with.

Paul:
The more we try and typify, what a fan is, the less we know about the broad spectrum. And that brings us back to what we were talking about right at the beginning, right. That there isn't one definition. And to claim that there is disingenuous.

Karen:
That's our conversation for this episode. Thanks again, to Dr. Paul Booth for joining us for such a fascinating discussion of fans and fan studies. If you'd like to learn more about his work or read more about fandom, order a Fan Studies Primer, or any of his other academic publications from your local bookstore. You can also find Paul Booth across social media platforms, but especially on Twitter with the handle @Paul Booth.

Ben:
And if you like this podcast and would like to hear more, please subscribe. And if you really like it, share with your friends and even leave us a review, we would love to know what you think. You can also check out our full library of human-centered resources, including how tos and breakdowns on People Nerds.com. Finally, check us out across social media. We'll drop our handles below.

Karen:
Thanks again for listening everyone. Tune in down the road for more interesting conversations and food for thought from outside the borders of UX. Thanks again for listening. See you next time, nerds.

Ben:
See you next time, nerds.