Ologies with Alie Ward - Fanthropology (FANDOM) with Meredith Levine

Episode Date: March 16, 2021

Why does some music give us butterflies? Why do we loooove certain comic books, social media accounts or TV characters? What story does your toothpaste tell? Legit professional Fanthropologist Meredith Levine is a fount of fandom knowledge and we chat all about everything from cosplay to K-Pop, Star Wars, Frasier, Trekkies, fan-fic, how influencer culture works, the algorithms, and how loving what we love is a form of self-care. WHO KNEW? Meredith did. Follow Meredith Levine at Twitter.com/meredithgene or @MeredithGene on Clubhouse. A donation was made to Partners in Health's and the Sierra Leonean Ministry of Health’s work to reduce maternal mortality in Sierra Leone's Kono District via: http://pih.org/hankandjohn Sponsor links: www.alieward.com/ologies-sponsors More links at: http://alieward.com/ologies/fanthropology Become a patron of Ologies for as little as a buck a month: www.Patreon.com/ologies OlogiesMerch.com has hats, shirts, pins, totes! Follow twitter.com/ologies or instagram.com/ologiesSupport the show: http://Patreon.com/ologies

No, hey, it's that TBT pic from when you wore baggy jeans and shell necklaces alleyward I'm back with a pop cultural Psychological episode it's gonna become very dear to your heart because it's about why something is dear to your heart First your dear to me patrons. Thanks for paying a dollar or more a month to submit your questions to all of us Thanks to everyone who talks and tweets about the show. Thanks to everyone leaving reviews, which I read every single one I churn back at you such as this one written this week by Michigander lady T lab who wrote. Yeah Love oligies while sitting in my car in the elementary school pick-up lane I was listening to oligies from my windows down and as another mom walked by she shouted. Hey, that's oligies

I got so excited to happen upon another oligite in the wild I became flummoxed and could only reply. Yeah, love oligies finding your own people so fun lady T Love so timely. You have no idea. So Panther apology. Let's do this episode. You ready? Okay, so Panther apology is indeed a real term It was coined by Kristen Longfield a marketing strategist who used to work at trailer park They make movie trailers and they have a very confusing name if you are not in the entertainment business but the fan part of Panther apology comes from the word fanatic which stemmed from the Latin for a temple or a sacred place and

Fanatic meant insanely but divinely inspired But we have been using it to mean a person who hella digs something since the mid 1600s long before we had TV series to gobble up and comic books to love although Let's be honest illuminated manuscripts from the Middle Ages Kind of like comic books, but with more horses and demon babies and gold leaf But either way this oligist happened to meet my now fiance a year or two ago I think and he demanded her business card to give me and I have wanted to record this episode At least for a year we're both LA based and we kept waiting for the pandemic to pass

But alas, we just recently recorded over the phone And it was such a compelling and interesting look at why we love what we love We talked for nearly two hours didn't even take a pee break to be honest I just adore her so she studied communication and culture at Indiana University Gohushers and got her masters at UCLA in critical media studies and fan studies She has been consulting and on staff as an anthropologist and a researcher at marketing firms and entertainment companies She runs her own called random machine We talked so long about so many things that y'all love that I could not cut this down into a single episode

So feast your ears on a delicious two-parter next week We're gonna dive in even more into stands versus fans. Where's the line? shipping people toxic fandoms Formulas on attaining internet fame and this episode you're about to hear we lay all the groundwork Talking about the history of fandoms. What a fandom even is Disney bounding her favorite things and sports versus art fanatics K-pop politics Trekkies

Star Wars prequels the curse of the algorithm and what to do when your favorite books are penned by problematic trolls creating your own fan base Self-identifying morality all kinds of stuff so cozy up and get to know and love behavioral researcher and legit Professional on her business card unironically Phanthropologist Meredith Levine I am Meredith Levine and my pronouns are she her great now you are a Phanthropologist I am

You're the first Phanthropologist I have ever heard of are you the only one on earth? I am by no means the only one on earth In fact the title is not even of my origin The title I heard at Well, I was still in graduate school. I went to a session With a woman named Chris who was working at trailer park at the time who now has her own consultancy called? Phanthropology hey, and it matched on to what I was studying at the time and said hey I want to do that for a living mm-hmm

And so it stuck with me for the last ten years of my professional career. It's so perfect I love that it just kind of says everything and it's also is anthropological, right? It is and I use a lot of mixed methods research in my work Increasingly I'm using a lot of analytics dashboards on social platforms But I have done participant observation. I have done a quantitative research. I have done survey design and focus groups and all sorts of other methods that researchers would use in the field and a lot of it is qualitative interpretation and very anthropological Are you a fan of any particular thing that you feel like really has grasped your heart?

Yes, okay, and my origin story of phanthropology dates back to age 13 with a research project in middle school So there's a long history there as far as the the professional interest is concerned But my current fandoms are a little sad right now as are many people's fandoms because I'm a fan of Disney theme parks And So they're a little sad right now, but That's okay. It needs to be in order to be safe Increasingly I'm fans of fewer things just because of the nature of the experience of being a fan and how tied it is Into identity so I like to say I'm a fan of fans

And my two biggest fandoms are Disney theme parks and nerdfighteria, which is the fandom Centered around the internet properties of John and Hank Green, especially the vlog brothers Hank and John Green if you don't know of them have built a bit of a media empire after starting a vlog channel together in 2007 and they now have several channels under their umbrella like Hanks SciShow They're also both prolific writers. John is the author of The Fault in Our Stars They have many titles between them and they fundraise for their charity Which is called the Foundation to Decrease World Suck and they are essentially trying to make the internet closer to the happiest place on earth Oh along those lines. Have you ever Disney bounded? I have Disney bounded and I've also done cosplay and

One of my favorite personal fan memories is Several years back. I did a costume of the tightrope walker from the haunted mansion ride and Went during Halloween, which is one of the only times where when you get the extra ticket adults can wear costumes in the park And so I got to wear the costume in front of the haunted mansion and I have some great photos from that This tightrope walker I looked it up is in a petticoat address and holds a parasol and when the elevator drops Sorry spoiler alert for the haunted mansion

You see that she's balanced on a rope right above the gaping jaws of a gator What a costume. I'm not a professional cosplayer by any means or a professional Disney Bounder But yes, I have I have done those things Would you ever want any of your ashes scattered in the haunted mansion even knowing that someone would just vacuum it up at the end of the Day? No, because I know that people vacuum it up at the end of the day Oh They know that though at this point they know that maybe there might be an iota of them left, right? Yeah And people try and do this a non-zero amount and

About the haunted mansion is their air filtration system is so good that they have to keep faking the like dust It's genuinely a really great air filtration system. Oh my god Okay, so you're 13 years old when I was 13 like digital media did not exist We had you know like laser discs or something, but at 13. What was your middle school project? So I went to a middle school in Los Angeles and we had a project called the eye search Which was designed to teach us about research methodologies Mm-hmm. It was a year-long project where we got to choose our topic and then proceed to

Research it with a list of methodologies We had to do with like minimum levels of kinds of sources and do primary research and secondary research and at the time the first three Harry Potter books had come out and Mind you. I was not Doing a research project on Harry Potter Mm-hmm. I was doing a research project on Harry Potter fandom. One person couldn't feel or explode and I

Could sense that there was a there there because of the midnight book parties that were starting to happen at bookstores and The way it was sweeping through students at the school and So my my 12 year old 13 year old self went the route of well Clearly we like this because it taps into archetypal characters and personality types The angle I went for mm-hmm as 13 year old me which

As 30 something year old me. I Was not super far off nice Because of the way that archetypal characters cater to our our abilities to project our identities into them It turns out the fandom is very identity based But that's where it started. I knew there was a there there. I read the only two nonfiction full-length books about Harry Potter at the time one was a guidebook to all of the like Wiccan and witchcraft references and the other was how to teach it in school source book for English teachers. Ah You know, we did a potterology episode about my chemist in Nebraska who uses Potter spells to talk about high-level chemistry

Which is really cool That is really cool. Yeah, she's very passionate about it Side note. I have since added a disclaimer on that episode show notes that says since this episode was first released JK Rowling has said and written some deeply transphobic sentiments and for this Ali no longer stands nor supports her So in listening to this episode let's marvel at theologist herself and her love of chemistry and remember that feminism is Intersectional and trans women are women and trans folks are welcome and beloved in theologies universe Okay, let's talk about fictitious people When you talk about archetypal characters, is there some basis or is there some correlation between like what personality?

psychologists finds like, you know, and Enjr Yeah, Myers-Briggs types. Yes. Thank you so In I haven't gone the psychological route But I had the opportunity to work on an amazing study in 2016 under the guidance of a business anthropologist named Susan Kresnicka. She's amazing and a genius and

We did a year-long study of fans and fandom about what the experience of Being a fan is at its most essential levels and how being fans differ depending on what you're a fan of and We the framework we used for that was moral foundations theory the framework established by Jonathan height in his book The Righteous Mind For a deeper dive, I'll link that Jonathan height book The Righteous Mind Why good people are divided by politics and religion, but as for right now, I will just scream. Yes Why why why why though into the sky and Meredith explains? and

so fandoms do differ based on the way they perceive morality in the world fandom is a Proxy for our identities. So where do archetypal characters fit in our abilities to see ourselves? reflected or our future selves reflected because aspects of identity are Different depending on what people are fan us up. So like sports fandom has a very interesting sense of placemaking That media fandom and music fandom does not necessarily have and what is placemaking exactly? It's ties to space so with sports fans often They are fans because

They were born into it mm-hmm Based on where they grew up. Yeah, I'm saying they because I'm not specifically a sports fan But I totally understand it because it's where you grew up oftentimes people are born into it And it's a family tradition. Yeah, which case being a fan of a team from home Helps contribute to a sense of home. Mm-hmm We've also seen in some of the research that we did that fans sports fans will also adopt new teams If they're moving to new homes as a way to feel more at home in the new place They're in and connect with other people who are in that new place

Have you ever done any studies on why sports fanatics in general use the first person plural when like we are gonna win Or they're gonna win when we're at home. We're eating nachos. We are absolutely not doing any physical exertion. Why is it a we? Because it's so it's such a proxy for identity mm-hmm Okay, like going down the street wearing a jersey. You see someone else wearing the same jersey and there's a sense of kinship there Same thing with like if you're on a date or at a networking mixer or something and Someone's wearing like jewelry. That's oddly specific to a very niche thing and you notice it's We're finding our like-minded people and expressing ourselves mm-hmm and

The way we use fandom and this was Such an interesting thing from this study is oftentimes it's to express ourselves but also to build community and To create self-care rituals Yeah, like mood regulation and experiencing feelings in a safe way as Preparation for real-world feelings and exploring new feelings as a way to get a full range of human emotions one of the frameworks we thought of in the beginning that is often talked about in

The fan studies discourse is if fandom is a proxy for religion. There are reasons why they're similar There are reasons why they're different Meredith says that well sports might make you feel belonging to a certain set of values about right or wrong or particular rituals Religion requires for the most part unwavering faith and spirituality and religion also address things like life after death Philosophies you're not gonna get from wearing a hat shaped like cheese My gosh, I have so many questions for you. I'm so sorry Interesting

But like I've got nothing but time today You want to take I am happy to chat That's right, my babies. This is gonna be a two-parter about why we love things. Okay, I'm gonna double back exactly What is fandom at such a basic question, but like what is it? How do you define just like liking something versus being a fan? so we asked that question in the research under Susan's research and One can like something and not be a fan of it and one can identify as a fan of it fandom is the portmanteau of Fanatic and kingdom or Dom as the suffix of like realm of Wow, okay

and It was first used to in religious contexts and then it was used in baseball and now it's used mostly in media and so Fandom has a few different Definitions there's fandom with a capital F when you're saying like the fandom Mm-hmm, which is generally in reference to a group of media fans who express a certain set of behaviors that largely revolve around transformative works and cultures and fan labor and Creativity. Mm-hmm. This is when you think of like fan fiction and shipping and that sort of thing is associated with the fandom

Which can be IP specific or in general based on these practices, but then you have fandom Which can be a proxy for the experience of being a fan Because that's a mouthful or any community of fans. So like not all sports fans will say they're part of a fandom Yeah, they'll say they're a fan of this thing, right? Whereas fandom is more commonly used in those Spaces of transformative works and cultures like books and movie franchises Okay, that makes sense and then when it comes again to those like archetypes and identities Do you find that there are? Certain archetypes that keep getting repeated like I remember to remember the show Gilligan's Island. Have you ever heard this theory?

No, please tell me the theory Theory that each of the seven people on Gilligan's Island represents a sin from the Bible from sloth to To greed I'm gonna run through these really fast coveting. Mr. Howell anger Mrs. Howell Lust ginger gluttony the skipper Envy Marianne sloth Gilligan and pride the professor pride is also vanity Which I didn't know but that's what a sides are for so it's like they all represent a Sin and they're in purgatory. I don't know But you know are there certain Kind of stamps of people that when people are creating, you know fictional works

They know this is a part of our personality that is going to really identify With this character like do we identify with all the characters because of different facets within ourselves or do? typically people find a character that they say I'm I'm a carry solo. Yeah, I'm a carry exactly. Yeah, it's so personal Mm-hmm. It's so personal because it's how someone sees themselves right now My husband and I are watching Frasier for the first time Good evening. Dr. Crane Dr. Sternen, it's nice to see you again

and Everyone there is so Relatable to us. Mm-hmm, but I can also understand how that's not the case for a lot of people and so it really depends on sense of self and How people conceive of themselves and how their identities change over time and their value systems change over time? For example, like I am a Hermione, but also I'm not a Gryffindor There's seeing yourself in characters, but then there's also the world building and the negative space to play around in and One of the things that we love about Frasier right now is how much negative space there is and so in

in the history of fan studies one of the typical examples of more is not always better sometimes more is just more mm-hmm is midichlorians in In Star Wars, it's from the prequels. Midichlorians are a microscopic life form that resides within all living cells They live inside me inside yourselves. Yes, and we are symbionts with them Symbionts life forms living together for mutual advantage Without the midichlorians life could not exist and we would have no knowledge of the force They continually speak to us telling us the will of the force

So from what I gather your Medichlorians are kind of like your microbiome, but instead of good poops and more serotonin you can like perform Telekinesis now you can check out the microbiology episode to learn how your gut party works on earth if you were not a Jedi knight and Jared would also like to add that Medichlorians sounds too much like mitochondria and he thinks it's too on the nose like come on, right? People did not want to know how the force worked We did not need this information

This was too much information Because it squeezed out room for imagination Like it squeezed all of the imagination out of it. We did not need a canonical explanation of like why the force exists because our Conceptions of it and thoughts around it were doing so much of a surface Two fans that the explanation was one worse than what we would think of and two

Filling in this vital negative space Where fans can project and imagine Ah got it that makes so much sense. And so freezer has a lot of negative space It has a lot of negative space. It's a show with like Like we're I don't know halfway through season one And one of the characters wives is referenced and we never meet her and we don't see her Like she's just like talked about while she's not in the room and

There's a lot of negative space there to imagine and play and The same is true. This is why a lot of like Multiverse time travel genre fair also It's one of the reasons why I think that that pulls so much fandom is because When you have that when you have a very nebulous metaphor for others and outsiders As like aliens tend to be

There's infinite possibilities Right to play Is that why maybe sci-fi and you know star trek star wars rick and morty has maybe a more Engaged or zealous fandom because it lets their mind run around within the universe Yes, and also infrastructure so

Star Wars is Star Wars and star trek Have two different kinds of infrastructure built around them and Fan scholars will all cite a book called enterprising women About the history of female star trek fans right and the role of that This was the 1992 publication enterprising women television fandom and the creation of popular myth by camille bacon smith Who examined how fan fiction written by women was often derided and even prominent

proficient or heroic female characters Have been frowned upon as being too unrealistic and this trope is called a mary sue and it's a complex issue in fan fic circles I found out by reading too many blogs But oftentimes finding fans in like the 70s and 80s of nerd culture stuff It was still a time when well roundedness in people Was a desired trait as opposed to being well lopsided Oh, okay. Whereas in a narrow casted world where everything is niche being well lopsided can be a way to find a community and so

sci-fi also has this culture of gathering and of sharing of zines and like home edits of vhs tapes and having conventions um pulp and science fiction literature have had conventions since like the early 1900s And so there were gathering places and ways to like meet people who were similar to you And with that came a lot of safe havens for people who may not have had other safe havens So like the comic book shop was a place for nerds to go

And be welcome Someone has mixed an amazing spider-man in with the peter parker the spectacular spider-man series This will not stand as opposed to school where That may not have been the case or home where that may not have been the case And so there is this community building element to it as well And how do you feel about the sustainability of that community building as niche? Is there any part of you that's watched geek culture and nerd culture be commodified to where it's no longer Something that is a subculture

Yeah, this is in parallel with media history So sports fandom Can be inherited because sports teams have been around long enough to be inherited We're just now hitting the point Where media franchises can be inherited So like dis disney has been inherited for generations Like go to disneyland go to disney world and grandparents are just as much fans as their four-year-old grandchildren

And so there's a lot of longevity there because it's intergenerational and can be taught from parent to child And part of home culture where sports fandom Generally was part of home culture It was broadcast on televisions and people would gather in bars and so there's that but now we're hitting a point in media history and media distribution Where something that Wasn't on the air or isn't on the air anymore can discover new fandom for example

Binging old frasier episodes at the touch of a button without needing a film archivist and a dusty projector Or is around in franchise form To be discovered and rediscovered by generation after generation and So now we're in the point where media can be big more mainstream fandoms in general Especially with properties that have been around for more than 10 years

That have robust cultures around them that are pretty easy to Find somebody else who likes those things A la star wars star trek dr. Who? right Super natural that sort of thing. Oh, I forgot to ask what um, what harry potter house are you? You're not griff indoor I'm not griff indoor. I um I'm a I'm a raven claw and if I had to pick a second house it would be Slytherin From my limited knowledge, I think you are a raven claw. You're so

Like academic and brainy and analytical and smart, but that is me only knowing you for 15 20 minutes, but Have my limited knowledge. I'm definitely a knowledge for the sake of knowledge kind of person Um, and then I think the secondary trait might be ambition, which gets a really bad rap It depends harry is an unreliable narrator And the things I could say about the harry potter fandom also of like what happens when you have a body of work that trains a generation of people To be activist because of the themes in the text And like what it's actually representing to people at a young age only to be expanded commodified and lose

Those activist undertones in the narrative itself and also like the author And so basically a generation of fans were raised to be more liberal than the franchise Was willing or able to sustain. Yeah, greater than the sum of its parts. Yeah Yeah, and I was gonna ask how you felt about that. Um, because I know so many people who grew up on it are Not disappointed but devastated rightfully by the personal choices that the authors made and opinions that and platforms like, um Is there any kind of? Grief of identity or disillusionment that you have noticed or felt Yes

Yeah I'd call that a big yes It's mourning the loss of what was a big part of one's identity Yeah, because we have all these frameworks and all of this cultural shorthand amongst a generation of people who were raised on these texts Who now have the question of should this be an inner generational ip? Like do I teach this to my children? Where is the merit of the story versus all of the stuff surrounding the story and What are the ethics of financially supporting an institution that?

People no longer agree with. Mm-hmm. I'm so disheartened by it and grossed out, but um It's not woven into necessarily my history the way it is You know some other peoples, but that was definitely a question we got from patrons It's like what do you do especially since things like appropriating Indigenous language about spirit animals is like well patronis is a better way to say that now it's like You know like there's all these shorthands that felt like a safe Inclusive space that's no longer feels that way. You know Yeah, and the question is also like how much

How much does the infrastructure behind the ip and the author impact the experience of the ip and from A literate media perspective It's well the answer to that is a lot because of how the intersection of media and storytelling and commerce of like well, do you support the Fantastic beast franchise as a result or not Do you continue to buy merch or not or do you only buy merch by like fan artists? Or to what extent is this artist making livelihoods and where where does all of that intersect and all of that is deeply personal

And very complicated and I wish there was a good right answer But the answer is it's deeply personal and really complicated. Yeah So from what I understand it's really complicated and deeply personal I mean real talk would it be easier if she were Not alive still I'm not in any way talking about putting a hit on her and I hope she knows what I mean. Does she know what I mean? Do you know what I mean? Yeah The way it is to separate the the art from the artist in

Posthumous works, you know Yeah, I mean, maybe there's also the like John Green notion of books belong to their readers of like the author doesn't matter Um, so also it depends on the kind of fan one is an if authorial intent matters Or is only what matters what's what ended up on the page, right? That's so interesting. You know, you mentioned I'm really early on something about a Kind of moral parallel to the fandoms that you you choose. Can you tell me a little bit more about that? What fandoms tend to have what ideals?

Yeah, so media fandoms tend to be a little bit more Um liberal and activist. Mm-hmm Sports fandoms tend to be a little bit more conservative. Okay music fandoms tend to be very like Live and let live. Okay Music fandoms also like really experience flow states from their fandoms

Oh, what does that mean? So like, uh, scholar whose name I'm about to butcher. That's okay. Hi. Mihai Ching sent me. Hi. Okay Did a lot of research on flow states and With music, it's easy to like be at a concert or be listening to an album or something and feel the state of timelessness effortlessness Sensory richness

This was discussed in the book stealing fire by steven kotler and jamey wheel who called this flow state stir S-t-e-r selflessness like a sense of self disappears Timelessness hours just seem like minutes Micro seconds can drag on and you can see them in vivid detail Effortlessness and are for richness gaining a lot of info and insight and really vivid detail again So according to their book getting into this flow state increases creativity and productivity by 400 So sick jams the cure for what ails us when you have a moment where the world feels bigger than yourself And you feel connected as like

Just one tiny piece of this giant electric Experience of life. Yeah, and that everything just kind of melts away for a little bit. Yeah There's a book called stealing fire all about this and how people get to this state music is one of those things So are like Adrenaline junkie type things like base jumping or skydiving So our meditation is like the slow long road drugs are the fast kind of dangerous road There are a lot of ways to achieve this state and it's one of those states that

people genuinely love being in maybe Because of that do anthropologists think that music fans are less judgmental Yeah, a little bit. I mean now So the internet also has changed A lot of that experience for some kinds of fans depending on how internet literate they are and how organized and activist they are um, and so Like kpop fans are really good

And this this this past year has shown Just how good kpop fans are like organizing for something outside of their cause in order to wreak a little pro-social trolling On parts of the internet that they do not agree with Oh such a goblins for good. I love it's for good. Yeah, like They're a delight They are a delight and a force not to be messed with. Yes. Why is that? Why do you think they're so pro-social?

So organized so zealous. Um, I know I have a niece sofia Who is a big kpop fan? And what do we find especially in in that age group? Maybe it's Gender identifying specific is is there a reason why kpop just gets its hooks in people's hearts? So I haven't done a ton of research on this subject and i'm sure there are a lot of scholars in the fan studies community who have Taken dives extensively into it, but from my more broad experience researching fandom There's the internet nature of it and a concept that henry jenkins

I think I think it was henry jenkins coined called pop cosmopolitanism Which is essentially being a citizen of the world and importing your culture from elsewhere And that used to be very difficult in the days of anime and manga and like coded vhs per country code And like needing to mail things and that used to be prohibitively difficult. Yeah, but with online spaces it is now Much much easier There's a lot more of an opening to what life is like in other places. I mean kpop and jpop have A little bit more of like an androgynous culture about them

Asian country is also a little bit more like communally oriented And part of it I think is just now like this is all happening at a time when gen z Has access to it and I was at ces a couple years ago listening to a longitudinal study about generational differences and gen z is different from preceding generations because of how pro-social they are They are much more community oriented and much less individually minded

than prior generations Is there any knowledge that you have on how they got that way because I feel like With the rise of social media in the last, you know, 13 15 years There was such so many drums being beaten about like this is going to be the most narcissistic Set of assholes the world has ever raised and then they're like the most pro-social How did that how did that happen? That's a great question I think part of it has to do with

thinking about the Cultures of the generations around them and the world that they're inheriting so like I still was at the tail end of a generation who like played outside in the middle of my street with neighbor kids Yeah, me too. I don't know to what extent that happens now on supervised. I don't have kids but I would be curious from listeners of the pod like Whether or not that's I mean

Covid aside like pre-covid is that still a thing? Mm-hmm that like parents do because oftentimes with device culture Like the device is the connectivity to friends in absence of Geographic communities, right? I wondered do parents let their kids play outside and in googling it I found out that there are actually laws now making it illegal to just let your kids peace out and hit the park solo Despite crime rates being lower than they were perhaps a generation ago, and I don't have kids

I just have one very hairy daughter and I have to watch her like a hawk outside So she doesn't feast on cat poo. So we all have different challenges now Speaking of challenges in parenting each week We donate to a cause of the allages choosing and Meredith chose partner in healths and the sierra leonean ministry of health's work to reduce maternal mortality In sierra leone's kono district and that money will go toward everything from hiring more community health workers To building and supplying a maternal care center of excellence and a neonatal intensive care unit And this effort was organized by the vlog brothers green and more info about it can be found in the link in the show notes

And that was made possible by sponsors of the show who i'm going to talk about for a second Okay, back to our interview. So meredith continued saying that kids finding connection through devices is a double-edged sword It's been great when we needed the physical distance of the last year in particular But also that the content delivered is controlled algorithmically by the platform itself And I could go on and on about algorithmic curation and its role in trends and culture, which is where a lot of my research is now Oh, oh my gosh This is where a lot of my research is now of like creator culture and algorithmic trends and how that shapes

Communities and also how that shapes the creative process Yeah In influence or culture and parasocial relationships like that's where a lot of my research is Is the thesis that it's fucked or is it? The basic thesis that you are getting people are getting fucked by the algorithm I feel very lucky that podcasts seem untouched by the algorithm and i'm knocking on like all of the wood possible but it seems like The algorithm is like capital t capital a

And it feels a little bit like a specter so Yes, and no in prior media eras There was commercial exchange for the piece of media in a lot of instances. Yeah, like movie tickets Or live shows or something like that in the olden days You paid dollars of money to see stuff such that having a good end product Was the point media was a product And

Some industries can get away with still treating it that way especially because the metrics of success often come from A body of peers giving out awards Where metrics of success can be decoupled from commercial success Think movies and Oscars maybe even streaming services that are ad-free and eligible for emmy's and Academy awards and golden globes and sack awards and tonys and grammy's so prestige trophies bragging rights

Face masks that match your couture gown and lots of publicity. Ah, okay. Um, but Now we're in a place where The creation of media Media is not the point Like it's not a product. It's a process because The business models have changed in a lot of instances Such that what matters is not the product. It's the process Because what's happening is it's an industry of audience development

Where we're shifting into attention economics here of like what is the value of an audience who is receptive to messaging Ah And this is where it's gonna get meta and weird I guess because here I am talking about this to you a professional creator in front of an audience who enjoys listening to you and Maybe would be happy to hear you read the phone book But like there's a lot that goes with that because There is the process of getting better over time Where like the early work if revisited

Is noticeably worse. Oh, yeah, oh for sure temporary work But that's part of the process and part of the point because There is this emotional ownership and stake in these businesses because the model is so transparent It is without an audience. This work would not exist Yeah, versus if you're at like a major film studio, there are a zillion layers Between the audience and the creative process. Yeah, because media is viewed as a product not a process and so

In those instances where media is a product not a process. It is absolutely counter-intuitive to Contemporary methods of distribution namely algorithmically distributed platforms because measurement is different In the amazing futurology episode with flash forwards rose evaleth We talked about the adage coined by a guy named andrew lewis who once Mused via a comment on metafilter if you're not paying for it. You're not the customer You are the product being sold and attention economy right there in a nutshell folks

Which is one reason why I love patreon so much, but that's a whole other episode Whether you're an advertiser measuring like the impact of a campaign or a creator Like measuring like success metrics for a youtuber or podcaster or whatever They're very different things if you're concerned with opening box office weekend. That's time bound It either hits or it doesn't which is essentially saying like the viral video strategy It's either good or it isn't straight out of the gate. Yeah as opposed to the platforms providing distribution Altering that distribution via algorithms to weigh the better producing or emerging products Meredith explains

so it's the The person who is disseminating The product Is kind of like putting their thumb on on the scale sort of like well Let's take eyeballs away from this which is getting Mediocre eyeballs and let's throw those eyeballs on this thing which is getting a little bit better to sort of propel it Yeah, or like Some creator made a creative choice to do something different

And a fewer percentage of that audience stuck around to care about it. Hmm Let's just stop showing that content to those people Because clearly they have stopped being interested regardless of any actions. They have taken or not taken to indicate disinterest Yeah, that is so terrifying for creators because it's like you To grow as a creator and to keep your fan base and be engaged. It seems like you do need to Have growth you do need to keep things interesting But at the same time if you take a creative risk that someone doesn't like Say 10% of people dip you could fuck your whole career

Well, temporarily temporarily temporarily Right because with enough persistence like The rebuilding process happens, but like it's like the stock market almost of like Stuff happens and then people get spooked and then

Show up again depending on what the thing is in the 1970s If you didn't like a creative decision on television You get to write a letter to a studio With no guarantee that anybody would read it Yeah and now All that has to happen is a tweet. Yeah

And if people are sufficiently unhappy It's possible to community organize to get a lot of people to tweet. I just uh read a book Called so you've been publicly shamed just just read that one and It's really interesting because it means that shame can be wielded By communities in any direction because that's the that's one of the big tools that they have So like k-pop is really interesting right now because they're not wielding shame. They're wielding randomness

Like this whole like pictures of pancakes for the million maga march thing Right like they're wielding internet culture to like derail things The pen is mightier than the sword and the meme is mightier than the pen is what we're learning Yeah, pretty much pretty much Meredith says that businesses are starting to realize that the object of fandom the influencer or the tiktok star Wouldn't exist as a commodity without the fandom supporting and flocking to and fueling it So the pandemic brought this to light even further

And like we're starting to see this with sports a little bit because there are no stadiums with live sports fans And so now like where do they congregate and where do they go and how do these businesses sustain themselves? and what happens to their like licensing and merchandising divisions and Like there are all of these networks built up in these business models around communities being able to congregate and Have these experiences Now there's threat to identity As much as there is the ability to find and choose and

build identity As well How do you feel about names for fandoms like trekkies twihards oligites for example I feel like that's something you can't name yourself But someone else can name it and then you can go along with it. Where does those come from? How long have those been happening? I think it's really important personally. Mm-hmm to be able to address the community as A name they come from a sense of community and a sense of like wanting to actually belong

I mean ultimately as humans we all want to belong And so I think it's a really important thing To have if it works Like Beyonce has the beehive and there are swifties. There are a lot of them And sometimes they come from point of origin unknown possibly a journalist possibly fans themselves possibly something that someone said off Hand as an object of fandom I haven't dove super deep into the etymology of names of fandoms

But I think from a community building perspective. It's important. Mm-hmm You know what would be amazing is if bonnigot fans called themselves the grand faloons Have you ever met a lot of bonnigot like only in school? Like bonnigot used to talk about a grand faloon is like a group of people who think they're connected But they're not like Hoosiers, but um like the grand. Oh, are you a grand faloon? I am as well, but Okay, I just looked on the book website goodreads and there is a curt bonnigot fan club And they are called the curt bonnigot fan club. Okay. This is a big question. I feel like has come up in the last couple of years People who are called famous for the sake of being famous or famous for being famous

What is the difference between an influencer and a celebrity? I feel like celebrity is still a compliment But an influencer there's something kind of snide about that. Um, how does that come up in fanphropology? So the whole study of celebrity and fame um Is almost like the inverse process Of fanphropology where fandom is concerned with the community And like celebrity fame is object of fandom, but celebrity and fame Generally refers to a person. Okay, rather than like IP

Okay, so like One could be famous or a celebrity Helen Zaltzman on the illusionist had like a great episode of that This was the october 2020 episode of the illusionist titled celebrity It also happens to feature hank green as well. Hello hank Also for more of the just phenomenal Helen Zaltzman, you can listen to her oligies episode Which is etymology and you can listen to me fanatic girl over her The other thing about like celebrity and fame

Is oftentimes one of the distinctions he made that I really liked is like do you care about their personal lives or not? Mmm Not everybody cares about the personal lives just the work like jennifer aniston is famous But like do we care about her personal life and would you buy a t-shirt with her on it? I mean, I do care about her personal life just a little bit I just want for her to be happy and for tabloids to stop painting her A fit wealthy woman as a tragedy because she didn't have a lot of babies and she went through a divorce So yes, maybe I do care a tiny bit and maybe I did google jennifer aniston t-shirts

And aside from the 98% of search returns that were just paparazzi photos of her wearing a thin shirt When it was apparently a little chilly out I did find some shirts with her face on them and the earnestly there was one that was just wall to wall All over full color print of various stages of aniston and hairstyles all her face and no joke I kind of want to wear this shirt But I can't decide if it would be Like post post post ironic or just too casually vulnerable anyway That is totally up to you

And like this is one of those magical things where like the community of people who care imbues the power And To stop caring Like willfully stop caring not just like it fades out of your life. Stop caring is really hard You do a lot of work too with brands and cultivating brands and When you look at fandoms of ip or of people How do you translate that to is kind of encourage at least authenticity?

This is the brand loyalty question. I didn't even know this was my question But I love merit. It's so much for knowing that this was gonna come up. She rolls. Um, like how does it translate to brands? So Most people Many people will have brand loyalty but not identify as a fan because the brand is not a proxy for identity necessarily like on display proxy of identity um, if you go into someone's house Which i'm just that kind of nosy person who does um, like if i'm back back when there used to be dinner parties

Um, I was the kind of person who would absolutely go look in the fridge of the host I'm telling you. I love her like because everything Like it from my perspective what you own is also a proxy for a value system Which is why aesthetic I think has come up so much in like internet culture of like cottagecore or like bohemian because

It's the kind of thing that is a little bit more of a beacon and There are some assumptions to be made of you based on brands What does it mean if you have toms of main toothpaste? Is anybody gonna be a fan of toms of main toothpaste? When I say this, I'm sure someone in the comments will be like, well, I'm a fan of toms of main toothpaste Um, but really or do you just like it and are using the word fan as a proxy for the idea of liking something? Is it the kind of thing that you would Wear merch for or like talk to other people about? Um, so there is brand loyalty, which largely has to do with did you inherit the brand? Is it what you grew up with?

um, or does it serve a function for you that Such that other brands can't compete. I was reading some white paper. I think that was talking about how we inherit our mother's tampon brands and like And like something big has to be different. There either has to be like big innovation Such that it makes it a markedly better product Or there is some other factor like price point that shapes a choice other than that choice

Which I can say is true for me and with toothpaste was true for me until my dentist recommended I used toothpaste for sensitive teeth and then I deviated from my family's inherited brand Because of a product a feature of the product and sometimes it can be about identity so like you have like tom's shoes and values based brands the whole concept of a benefit corporation and non-profits as brands and like transparency of production You know those feel good do good brands that we gravitate toward like moths to an energy efficient led light because

It turns out that the story of the product is a story that In telling reflects on ourselves. Okay, so like if you Were to come into my home I would tell you the story of Our dining room table, which was my grandmother's which was a Gerald McCabe dining table Which came from a collaboration he did with a furniture maker and an architect In the era of mid-century furniture, which was unusual because Gerald McCabe primarily made guitars. Yeah, but like

The table is a table. You've probably seen a lot like it But the story of the table is more interesting than the object itself And so Are we building social capital for ourselves when we get to tell the story of the brands and products? We surround ourselves with Which is a different thing than fandom It's it is personal social capital building of like are you a taste maker in your friend circle? Is this an interesting story? Is this something that reflects some level of values for you like

conservation and ecology or upcycling or vintage culture or wellness and holistic medicine like if I were to Come into a friend's house and it was you know dream catchers and poofs and Burning incense You know, that's a whole vibe that communicates like a belief system and a value system PS leave the dream catchers to indigenous folks as they're an item originating with the Ojibwe people and not something

You should casually buy cheap knockoffs or make yourself out of stuff from hobby lobby Because it's boho. I'm saying this to make it less awkward I feel like steak ums is killing it. I don't know if you've seen steak ums on twitter, but Just real chef's kiss. They've just been They like It's a frozen beef brand, but whoever they got as their social media manager It just goes full on about like progressive politics I should say not so much progressive politics, but pro science sentiments, which I feel like in the heart of 2020's anti-mask movement

Was important on april 6 2020 steak ums official verified account tweeted Friendly reminder in times of uncertainty and misinformation Anecdotes are not data Good data is carefully measured and collected information based on a range of subject dependent factors including but not limited to Controlled variables meta analysis and randomization 19,000 retweets 70,000 likes who knew 2020 could deliver a blast of fresh air

From the bullhorn of a really disgusting process to meet product So then follow-up question to you. Have you bought steak ums? I've thought about it I've thought about it and then i'm like i'm trying to eat less beef so Yeah, like because they're also there's also the like everyone now has to be a publisher type mentality that exists with the internet that means The product can't stand on its own anymore because now every brand is in the audience development game

And every brand wants fans right like everyone wants fans right, I think probably to a point it's interesting because um Actually, I'm gonna make us go through patreon questions because there are questions I want to ask you that patrons asked and so I'm gonna ask it There are questions through my mouth. Is that cool? Great. Okay, let's do it So next week we will ask this very smart and lovely person plenty of pretty basic questions because that's how we do it around here

Now whether you're trying to build a brand for yourself or you want to have more perspective on why you like what you do And why you like other people who like what you do tune in next week. Trust me. We cover all kinds of really juicy stuff Meanwhile, you can follow at meredith gene on twitter and on clubhouse where she's been leading discussions on things like fandom And the attention economy you can follow me ally ward at ally ward on twitter and instagram We're also at oligies on both. You can join the facebook oligies podcast group Thank you, erin talbert for admitting that you can find other oligites in the wild with merch at oligies merch dot com Thank you, shannon veldis and bonnie dutch of the comedy podcast. You are that for managing that Thank you. Noelle dillworth for helping manage all my shoot and recording schedules, which i'm very bad at

Thanks, emily white and all the transcribers for making transcripts available on our website at ally war dot com slash oligies dash extras There's a link to those. They are free. The link is in the show notes as well as bleeped episodes Thank you. Kayla patent for bleeping them. Thank you editors. Jared sleeper who hosts quarantine calisthenics every weekday at 90 am pacific on twitch And to Jurassic park fanatic and kitty lover Stephen remorse of the podcast see Jurassic right and the per cast and the new everything but the movie a star wars books podcast nick Thorburn of the very good band islands wrote and played the theme music and at the end of each episode I tell a secret and this week The secret is i was able to get my first modernist shot this past week

Because i work on an educational tv show and i can't wear a mask on camera for it And i travel a lot for it and i'm really So thrilled to be vaccinated. I can't even tell you the rollout in california has been a little weird Last week they were shelving or throwing away more vaccine doses than they were administering So there were tons of open dodger stadium appointments And as i was waiting in the car to get the shot I scrawled thank you and a heart on my arm in ballpoint pen to surprise the health check who gave me the shot It was very corny, but they liked it and i'm glad i did it and my arm hurt for a couple days

But my heart has never been more at ease. So i hope your turn comes soon and i hope when it does that you take it Okay, until next week. I'm a fan of you. Bye. Bye I am not one of your fans