CT Jones: Stan Culture
Talk summary and resources created by Alex Turvy.
Talk Summary:
Stan culture is associated with a necessary aggression that is involved in backing up stan obsessions
People stan celebrities, ideas, and even emotions
The key feature is that they can’t just love something, they also have to defend it vigorously no matter what that entails – and often even if the object of their “stan-dom” changes or does something ostensibly problematic
Stans become both more powerful and more dangerous when they unite and act in groups
CT has had a few articles go viral in stan communities, but the most prominent was an article she wrote about how some people online think that Taylor Swift may be gay
Stan culture is characterized by focus, energy, and aggression – and this all amounts to what she calls “Internet Mobilization”
Internet Mobilization ultimately applied to politicians, points of view, and more
One of the responses to this pervasive online culture is to “log off and touch grass”, but this excludes people from one of the best parts of the internet, which is the community that it creates – plus, it ultimately doesn’t address the core problem
“We get to the point in our lives where we're gonna start to see history being shaped not by who's right, who's wrong or who had the best argument, but just the amount of people who are willing to tweet until someone decides, you know what, it's not worth it anymore.”
One of the other best parts of the internet is how it gives marginalized people a voice, but ultimately what she observes is that you can’t escape the problems of the offline world and they are typically re-created in communities and networks online
It’s essential to think about what safeguards we can create for everyone because ultimately you can’t effectively “beat” people who are acting in bad faith
Key Insights and Questions:
What, if anything, makes this phenomenon unique to the internet generally and social networking sites more specifically?
Stan culture was a feature of earlier platforms like Myspace and Tumblr, but the affordances of platforms like Twitter and Reddit seem to lend themselves to the collectivist action that characterizes stan culture of 2023.
What does it mean to stan ideas and beliefs? Can we identify a more detailed typology of how this operates across ideological boundaries?
Talk Notes & Related Resources:
A nuanced discussion and challenge to the idea of digital dualism, which draws a distinction between the online world and the offline, “real” world. Given how stan culture impacts life off the screen, this is a good site to explore how digital dualism fails to account for important social dynamics.
Groupies, Fangirls and Shippers: The Endurance of a Gender Stereotype
These discussions are often quite gendered and this article is a good exploration of this part of stan culture specifically.
“... the enduring presence of older stereotypes within teen drama fandoms – particularly the ‘groupie’ – signals the agility of sexism, as the term can now be understood as more of a generational designation rather than a medium-specific one.”