How Fans Created the Voice of the Internet – The New Yorker

When the Internet-culture reporter Kaitlyn Tiffany first encountered One Direction, the British-Irish boy band, she was home for the summer after her freshman year at college. She was sad and sick of herself; shed struggled to fit into her schools hard-partying social scene. Most Saturday nights, she writes, I would put on something ugly, drink two beers in a fraternity annex and wait for someone to say something I could throw a fit about, then leave. Tiffany was moping around the house when her younger sisters cajoled her into watching This Is Us, a One Direction documentary. Her first impressionsbland songs, too much shiny brown hairwere soon overtaken by a weird sense of enchantment. The boys were goofy; they were sweet. One of them touchingly imagined a fan, now grown, telling her daughter about the bands terrible dance moves. Finding 1D, Tiffany writes, was like connecting to something pure and reassuring and somehow outside of timelike being yanked out of the crosswalk a second before the bus plows through.

But Everything I Need I Get From You, Tiffanys new work of narrative nonfiction, is not about One Direction. As much as I love them, she writes, the boys are not so interesting. Instead, the bookwhich is wistful, winning, and unexpectedly funnysets out to explain why Tiffany and millions of others needed something like One Direction as badly as we did, and how the things we did in response to that need changed the online world for just about everybody. The books initial lure may lie in the second proposition. For me, at least, fandom has started to feel like a phenomenon akin to cryptocurrency or economic populisma history-shaping force that wed be foolish to ignore. After all, fans dont just drive the entertainment industry, with its endless conveyor belt of franchise offerings and ever more finely spliced marketing categories. They also affect politics (as when K-pop groupies flood police tip lines during Black Lives Matter protests) and influence the news (as when Johnny Depp stans attack the credibility of his alleged abuse victims). One of Tiffanys most provocative arguments is that fans have drafted the Internets operating manual. Their slang has become the Webs vernacular, she writes, and their engagement strategiesriffing, amplifying, dog-pilingsustain both its creativity and its wrath.

One Direction makes for a good case study. The five heartthrobs came together on a reality show, in 2010the height of Tumblrs popularity, and a time when teen-agers were beginning to sign up for Twitter en masse. The girls who worshipped the band, called Directioners, were fluent in the tropes of the social Internet: irony, surrealism, in-group humor. Interviewing and describing these girls, Tiffany revisits the teenybopper stereotype, a punching bag for critics since Adorno. Nobody is primed to see self-critique or sarcasm in fans, she writes. But her subjects, far from frantic or mindless, are productive, even disruptive, obscuring the objects of their affection with a mannered strangeness. The book distinguishes between mimetic fandomthe passive variety, which celebrates the canon exactly as isand transformational fandom, which often looks like playful disrespect, and can deface or overwrite its source material. Directioners, Tiffany argues, are projection artists, and she highlights their outr handiwork: deep-fried memes, crackling with yellow-white noise and blurred like the edges of a CGI ghost; a physical shrine where Harry Styles, the groups breakout star, once vomited on the side of the road. In an affecting chapter, Tiffany makes a pilgrimage to Los Angeles to find the shrine herself. But its creator, confused by how many people construed her marker as crazy or maliciousshed wanted only to send up the lust and boredom that would lead someone to memorialize pukehad taken it down. The sign, she tells Tiffany, was more a joke about my life than about Harrys.

Indeed, the deeper the book plunges, the more incidental the singers end up feeling. Theyre raw material, trellises for the fantasies of self being woven around them. (The bands relentless blankness comes to seem a feature, not a bug.) Tiffany acknowledges that fannish enthusiasms arent random, that they have a lot to do with marketing. The word fan, she writes, is now synonymous with consumer loyalty. But she also cites the media scholar Henry Jenkins, who asserts that fans are always trying to push beyond the basic exchange of money. At times stubbornly unprofitabletweeting hes so sexy break my back like a glowstick daddy about Harry Styles isnt likely to boost his bottom linethey can serve as allies to artists hoping to transcend the commercial. Tiffany quotes Bruce Springsteen, who reportedly insisted that he wanted his music to deliver something you cant buy.

This same chaotic energy can make fans annoying, even dangerous. Tiffany runs through the Larry Stylinson conspiracy theory, which hijacks a time-honored technique of fan fictionshippingto posit a secret relationship between Harry Styles and his bandmate Louis Tomlinson. Emboldened by lyrical, photographic, and numerical clues, Larries rained vitriol on the singers girlfriends, closing ranks and terrorizing dissenters. (Some also determined that Tomlinsons newborn son was a doll.) Such harassment campaigns may not approach the level of Gamergate, Tiffany writes. But any kind of harassment at scale relies on some of the same mechanismsa tightly connected group identifying an enemy and agreeing on an amplification strategy, providing social rewards to members of the group who display the most dedication or creativity, backchanneling to maintain the cohesion of the in-group, which is always outsmarting and out-cooling its hapless victims, all while maintaining a conviction of moral superiority.

Its scary stuff. Yet the social event of fandom may finally be less compelling than its individual dimension. Being a fan, for Tiffany, is achingly personal. I loved her musings on why and how people pledge themselves to a piece of culture, and whether that commitment changes them. At one point, she describes the historian Daniel Cavicchis work with Springsteen buffs. Cavicchi was interested in conversion narratives: some of his subjects arrived at their passion gradually, but others were suddenly, irrevocably transformed. Tiffany talks to her own mother, a Springsteen obsessive, who recounts what ethnographers might call a self-surrender story, in which indifference or negativity is radically altered. (I fell in love and I just never left him, her mom sighs, recalling a Springsteen performance from the eighties.) The chapter draws intriguing parallels between fandom and religious experience, teasing out the mystical quality of fans devotion, how oddly close we can feel to icons weve never met. It also explores the link between affinity and biography. For Tiffanys mother, Springsteen concerts punctuated the blur of raising young children; one show even marked the end of her chemotherapy treatments.

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How Fans Created the Voice of the Internet - The New Yorker