Microsoft Word - arvidsson.docx


 
Selected Papers of Internet Research 15:  

The 15th Annual Meeting of the  
Association of Internet Researchers 

Daegu, Korea, 22-24 October 2014 
 

 

Suggested Citation (APA): Arvidsson, A. (2014, October 22-24). Collaborative crowding, a digital 
ethnography of adolescent fan cultures on twitter. Paper presented at Internet Research 15: The 15th 
Annual Meeting of the Association of Internet Researchers. Daegu, Korea: AoIR. Retrieved from 
http://spir.aoir.org. 

COLLABORATIVE CROWDING, A DIGITAL ETHNOGRAPHY OF 
ADOLESCENT FAN CULTURES ON TWITTER 
 
Adam Arvidsson  
University of Milano 
 
The study of celebrity and fandom is a well-established area of inquiry into the field of 
online popular culture. Adolescent use of social media in practicing fandom and 
celebrity have been explored in particular detail. Most of these studies have used small 
data seta and focused on identity construction and the inter- personal dynamics of 
celebrity and fandom. The result has been an image of online fandom as transpiring in 
deliberative publics where actions can be understood as rationally motivated- whether in 
terms of the instrumental rationality of the ‘neoliberal’ branded self, or in terms of the 
communicative rationality of the fan community.  
 
In this study we have looked at the crowd dynamics of adolescent fandom by gathering 
a corpus of 110.000 tweets around the top ten trending teen-band tags on twitter during 
a week of May 2013. The result is an image of fan cultures as structured by cascades of 
imitation, with very little in terms of deliberation of information transfer. However, this 
dynamics differs from classic accounts of crowds in two ways. First, the directionality of 
crowding on twitter is given by the algocratic affordances of the platform itself: this way 
crowd behavior becomes directed towards the purposeful pursuit of individual visibility 
(defined as number of RT and @) and, at the collective level of turning a hashtag into a 
tending topic. Second, individual actors are reflexively aware of the power of the crowd 
in achieving celebrity and trend and frequently appeal to it in their attempt to pursue 
these aims. This gives rise to a collaborative ethic whereby individual make affective 
appeals to the collective identity of the crowd in order to attract mobilize its potential for 
the purpose at hand.  
 
Looking at fan-culture on twitter form he point of view of crowd dynamics provides new 
insights on the nature of value and value creation on social media platforms. First, this 
study points to what we call ‘collaborative crowding’ as a model for value creation. This 
modality is distinct from both traditional models of economic rationality and 
contemporary theories of peer-to-peer dynamics in that its primary motivation is located 
at the level of collective affect, rather than individual motivation. Second, this 
collaborative crowding comes with an embryonic ethical dimension that emphasizes the 
collective dimension of value creation and, along with it individual debts towards the 
collectivity. This suggests that social media platforms- even when they are used in the 



 

 

most banal and commercial way- cannot simply be reduced to the proponents of 
‘neoliberal’ selfhood. Rather adolescent micro celebrities on twitter seem to be 
harbingers of a new kind of as yet un-theorized post-neoliberal frame of mind. We 
suggest that further research on this have implications for elaborating a more nuanced 
understanding of the forms ethics and solidarities that prevail in the New Social overall.