Glee Fandom and Twitter: Something New, or More of the Same Old Thing?

Abstract

This study extends critical television studies research by examining the emergence of Glee fan practices on Twitter and the implications these practices have for both producers and consumers. Highlighting the intricacies of the fan behaviors as regulated by Twitter as the medium, this research argues that the narratives developed through transmedia storytelling by fans on Twitter work to both support the notion of participatory culture and yet, in the creation of these fan projects, also reinforce the consumer behavior that marketed programming depends upon when strategizing about targeting audience viewership decisions.

Keywords:

• Fandom
• Glee
• New Media
• Twitter
• Television
• Transmedia Storytelling

Acknowledgments

The authors thank Michaela Meyer for her wonderful insight, unbridled support, and thoughtful editing, Danielle Stern and Daniel Bernard for initially encouraging the undertaking of this project, Elizabeth Kerr for her patience and attentive editing in its final stages, and three anonymous reviewers for their helpful suggestions and direction.

Notes

Formspring.me is an online social forum launched in 2009 where users submit questions (even anonymously) to other users, whose responses are posted on their own profile page (Kincaid, 2010).

Although constantly evolving along with the media in question, the American Psychological Association Publication Manual, 6th edition, does not yet have published standards for citing social media referenced in academic work. Typically, URLs are used when referencing online data, and this is suggested by the APA Style Blog for Twitter and Facebook posts (Lee, 2009). Due to the lifespan of tweet searches on Twitter, Google search, and Google Reader (the system used to archive the data referenced), as well as account name changes as the show's storyline changed, retroactively retrieving the URLs for citation purposes in the present study was unsuccessful. Therefore, the tweet data in this study references the account name, the date, and the time of each post. In lieu of direct URLs to the tweets mentioned, the following are the URLs for each character account that was a part of this study in order of reference: @RachelBerryWMHS, https://twitter.com/#!/RachelBerryWMHS; @K_Hummel, https://twitter.com/#!/K_Hummel; @MercedesWMHS, https://twitter.com/#!/MercedesWMHS; @Will_Schue, https://twitter.com/#!/Will_Schue; @EmmaH_WMHS, https://twitter.com/#!/EmmaP_WMHS (“Emma” was married and divorced, and her account name has since been changed from “EmmaH_WMHS” to “EmmaP_WMHS”; @Q_Fabray, https://twitter.com/#!/WMHSQuinn (The account name “Q_Fabray” has since been changed to WMHSQuinn); @TheFinnOne, https://twitter.com/#!/TheFinnOne; @SamEvansQB, https://twitter.com/#!/SamEvansQB; @MChangWMHS, https://twitter.com/#!/MChangWMHS; @tina_cohenchang, https://twitter.com/#!/tina_cohenchang; @Noah_Puckerman, https://twitter.com/#!/Noah_Puckerman; @Blaine_Dalton, https://twitter.com/#!/BlaineA_Warbler (When “Blaine” transferred from Dalton Academy to the New Directions, his Twitter account name changed also); @artie_abrams, https://twitter.com/#!/artieabrams.

The italics in some of the data represent a formspring.me question, where the answer is linked in the form of a tweet by the account. The italics stand in for the hyperlinked text one would see if looking at this tweet on Twitter.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Megan M. Wood

Megan M. Wood received her BA in Communication Studies from Christopher Newport University in 2011 and is currently a graduate student at the University of South Florida.

Linda Baughman

Linda Baughman is an Associate Professor in the Department of Communication Studies at Christopher Newport University.