sfandom – Page 2 – Superfandom, the Book

JHU Engineering | The New World of ‘Superfans’

July 1, 2018July 17, 2018Interviews

What do you do when you’ve founded a successful company and an unexpectedly strong online culture arises that threatens to overwhelm your carefully curated brand? Well, if you are Zoe Fraade-Blanar ’02, you write a book and call it Superfandom: How Our Obsessions Are Changing What We Buy and Who We Are.

The story begins in the years after Fraade-Blanar earned her degree in computer science from the Whiting School in 2002. She was traveling through Asia working as a freelance web coder. Her traveling companion was Aaron Glazer, KSAS ’02, a fellow Johns Hopkins alum with degrees in history.

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LA Review of Books | Cosplay and Clotted Cream: The Lasting Appeal of Jane Austen

April 30, 2018April 30, 2018Citation

DURING MY DAYS in middle school in the rural Midwest, I accompanied my friend Beth to several of her father’s Civil War reenactments. Along with them, I learned how to sew my own costumes, frontload a musket, and fire a cannon. Thrilled by all this, I went on to join every reenactment enclave I could weasel my way into. Over the years, I have posed as a 19th-century explorer giving tours of Frenchtown with a terrible accent, taken a turn as a Victorian prostitute dragging tourists through a haunted brothel, and led Boston visitors down the Freedom Trail dressed in full colonial attire. Through it all, I came to learn the joys of what Zoe Fraade-Blanar and Aaron M. Glazer have dubbed “superfandom” — a mode of fervent, participatory cultural consumption.

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Quartz | Spotify and Kylie Minogue Reminded Me That I’m a Fan, Not Just a Click

April 9, 2018Citation

So it turns out I’m one of the top Kylie Minogue listeners on Spotify. I found this out one morning recently, when I sleepily opened the streaming app to start my day with the pop star’s new single, “Dancing.”

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The Verge | How Ticketmaster’s Verified Fan program toys with the passions of fandom

April 2, 2018Citation

Being a fan is a matter of life and death. The day of Ticketmaster’s presale for Taylor Swift’s upcoming Reputation tour, one fan wrote on Tumblr, “When I die[,] I want Ticketmaster Verified Fan to lower me into my grave so they can let me down one last time.” It’s a sentiment that was liked or reblogged by more than 1,000 others.

Verified Fan is a major piece of fandom outreach by Ticketmaster, once one of the most maligned corporations in the world, and this isn’t exactly the sentiment it’s meant to engender.

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Up This Way | Superfandom

January 23, 2018Interviews

Fans create the world around us. And that’s even more so in the digital age where creators, athletes, companies – whoever – can communicate directly with their fanbase. It’s got to the point where fans opinions about their favourite things can change what the object of their fervour evolves into. Simon Morton spoke to the co-author of Superfandom, Zoe Fraade-Blanar.

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CNET | Things work differently for YouTube celebrities. It’s all about the devoted fan base.

January 3, 2018Citation

It’s a different story for traditional celebrities, who often all but vanish after massive scandals. Movie star Mel Gibson kept a low profile for nearly a decade after a video surfaced of him in 2006 making anti-Semitic remarks. YouTube fans are more likely to defend their beloved stars because the online personalities are more connected to their audiences, Fraade-Blanar said.

“When you’ve made something a part of yourself, whether it’s a Yankees shirt or subscribing to a certain YouTube celebrity, you have a huge incentive to make that thing look good,” she said. “Because when they look bad, you look like a fool for following them.”

Hard-core fans can help determine how YouTube’s performers will fare after a controversy. Logan Paul’s legion of subscribers apparently don’t have an issue with his suicide forest video, and for now they’re keeping him afloat.

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Buzzfeed | This Year’s Best Books For Everyone In Your Life

January 3, 2018January 3, 2018Reviews

Speaking of history, two books cross genre lines to examine social and cultural concepts through music: Ann Powers’ Good Booty: Love and Sex, Black and White, Body and Soul in American Music looks at the ways in which we use music to communicate such fraught issues as race and sex; Superfandom by Zoe Fraade-Blanar and Aaron M. Glazer explores fandom itself — its history, stigma, psychology, and, of course, its effects on our economy.

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The Daily Fandom | #amreading — Superfandom: A Book About All Things Fandom!

September 6, 2017September 6, 2017Reviews

The entire book is stellar, and the storytelling is marvelous throughout. It is more of a ride through fandom-try than anything else. Not only does this book state why fandoms are important and why they will continue to be, but it also backtracks to history. Where fandom started and where they are headed with the new digital age.

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Financial Express | Magnificent obsessions: Book Review on Super Fandom by Zoe Fraade-Blanar and Aaron M Glazer

August 28, 2017Reviews

An entire episode of popular television series The Big Bang Theory centres on the main character, Sheldon, obsessing over a vintage 1975 Mego Star Trek Transporter toy. With 50 years and just under 550 combined hours of television and film, Star Trek practically created the template for fandom and the nerd culture of today. All the four male heroes in Big Bang are science geniuses, as well as Trekkies, as Star Trek fans are called, fluent in Klingon and often play Boggle in the language. They are also major superhero fans, and their usual idea of weekend fun is an evening at the local comic bookstore—their big getaways are always Star Trek conventions and Comic Cons. Fandom has swelled with the rise of modern consumerism, technological advances and the spread of infotainment. Fans today go well beyond geeks. Some 40,000 people attended Berkshire Hathway’s (Warren Buffet’s company) annual general meeting in Omaha, Nebraska, in 2014. Look at the top 10 movies worldwide any year—most of them, if not all, are based on sci-fi/fantasy/children classics that are evergreen, with huge franchises and fan bases. This year’s surprise top hits were women-centric—Wonder Woman and Disney’s Beauty and the Beast. And then there are the fans of football or baseball clubs and musicians.

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MGMT Magazine | Superfandom: un libro racconta come l’ossessione dei superfan abbia conquistato il mondo

August 28, 2017Reviews

I consumatori alfa della nostra società. Così vengono definiti i fan, o meglio i ‘super fan’, persone talmente appassionate da un prodotto, o da un film, un musicista, una serie tv da diventare più esperti degli stessi creatori. Per analizzare questa crescente ossessione, Zoe Fraade-Blanar e Aaron M. Glazer hanno pubblicato il volume “Superfandom: How Our Obsessions are Changing What We Buy and Who We Are” (Superfandom: come le nostre ossessioni stanno cambiando i nostri acquisti e chi siamo).

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