Understanding Fandom and Fan Culture: An In depth look at BBC's Sherlock

An In Depth Analysis of Sherlock (BBC)’s Fandom:

a Preface/Background of our study for our presentation and what we will be discussing!

Presentation

Abstract/ Introduction:

Fandom and fan cultures have existed for decades, if not centuries; however, in recent years, these groups and productions have seen a steady and prominent rise with emerging digital technologies, mediums, and platforms, that have helped create large active communities around a plethora of different media texts. The freedoms of the internet have truly changed the way these groups of fans interact and distribute both fan fiction, as well as general discussion of a given text. To better understand how these communities operate, we decided to take an in depth looking at one of the most popular Television Fandom’s currently operating today; BBC’s Sherlock.

By studying this particular fandom, we aimed to accomplish three primary things: Understanding how these fandoms operate and the number of different platforms/outlets there are for even just this one show, the types of users creating and interacting within these communities and why they do, and finally, immersing ourselves and becoming part of a community by creating our own fiction and seeing the reaction it would get.  

It became apparent very quickly that this was an extremely large and difficult animal to tackle. The more we looked, the more there was to analyze, and we found almost immediately that there is an over saturation of users, posts, outlets, and time devoted to these fandoms, and specifically Sherlock. With that in mind we narrowed our research to a few outlets/community bases devoted to the show, including: Sherlock.Boardhost.com, bbcsherlock.livejournal.com/ sherlockbbc.livejournal.com, and archiveofourown.com/tags/sherlock (AO3, an extremely popular fan fiction site). We reached out to members with questions, as well as posted our slash video hoping to get responses. With crowded communities, thousands of posts, and countless threads and discussion topics, we did not receive as much feedback as we would have liked, but still were able to learn a ton about this crazy fandom! It is an amazing phenomenon, and an extensive research study could truly tackle and further answer our research questions, but we tried to find out, and make conclusions from our findings as best as possible!

Sports Blogging and the Effects of Social Media

This research project was put together in order to understand the world of sports blogging, breaking news and the effect of social media (more specifically, Twitter.) I was fortunate enough to interview four bloggers that range from New York Yankees coverage to New York Knicks coverage. Originally, I was hoping to interview professional journalists and bloggers, however the nature of their blogs along with their on-going news coverage disallowed them from responding to my e-mails. Since both the NBA and the MLB were experiencing more activity than normal (NBA had the All-Star Game in Houston, while the MLB started Spring Training in various locations in Florida and Texas,) the reporters/bloggers on ESPN New York or SNY.TV were unable to be reached for an interview.

That being said, I was able to speak with four bloggers, each with a different viewpoint, a different blogging style, and a different way of coverage. From there, I was able to distinguish the differences in sports reporting along with how Twitter has affected how they have reported news over the past few years.