Conference Agenda

Academic attention on Discord has often focused on its potential for harassment and spreading hate and bigotry, at time even called "hateware" (Brown and Hennis 2019). As the userbase of Discord expands beyond gamers and more internet groups, such as media fandoms, take up the platform, there has been increased scholarship examining how these new groups of users engage with Discord in more positive ways. This paper examines how one such server, a private Supernatural fanfiction Discord server called The Lagoon, is maintained through the relations between its members.

Using distributed cognition and Actor Network Theory (ANT), this paper investigates relations between users in The Lagoon through digital ethnography, including three months of participant observation, semi-structured interviews with 26 members, and ongoing conversations with server administrators. Unlike prior studies that focus on large, highly active servers, this research explores a smaller, more intimate server of approximately 125 members, reflecting the size and structure of most Discord servers.

Findings reveal a complex, unevenly distributed network where active members engage in daily discussions, collaborative writing, and interactive “bot” usage, while the less active members still report feeling the affect generated by those interactions. This paper introduces the concept of the “ecosystem” to capture these messy relations, proposing that cognitive processes like inspiration and productivity are distributed throughout the ecosystem. While acknowledging potential imbalances and toxicity, this study highlights the capacity for positive collaboration on Discord, adding to recent scholarship that analyses the platform beyond its potential for "hateware."

Approaching shame from a queer theoretical framework, this paper will consider how the dynamic of shame operates within popular music fandoms online. Fangirls are subject to and participate in external and lateral shaming in order to enforce femmephobic ideals of normative femininity within fandom spaces, leading to derision with these fandoms often labelled as ‘toxic’. However, shame is also used productively – shame has been made a criterion for community bonding and shared intimacy between fangirls. Drawing on surveys and interviews with fangirls of popular music, this paper aims to uncover how fangirls ultimately negate and rework experiences of shame through participating in pop music fandom, as this collective shame strengthens community ties and feelings of kindship among fangirls.

In the current era of greatly increased availability of media technology platforms, fans with their domains continue to expand, becoming a rapidly growing concept of our time (Scott, 2019; Stanfill, 2019). The study examines Cesuo [厕所, toilet], a type of social bot account on Weibo, differs from algorithm-driven bots as it’s manually managed by real users who set up site conventions, review and post users’ submissions, and promote opinion coordination. As an emerging mode of information exchange and group interaction in Chinese Internet culture, Cesuo is especially active in fandom. It serves as both an organizational structure and an information dissemination tool, offering insights into how individual fans regulate collective personas and providing a new organizational model for fan communities in the platform media era. Cesuo can be seen as a type of fan-create Nonhuman Online Persona (NHOP), a coherent digital assemblage with no direct connection to individual human identities. The research investigates how Cesuo operates, its role in fan community building, and the power dynamics it establishes. By analyzing two representative Cesuo accounts and conducting semi-structured interviews, the study identifies three key characteristics of Cesuo: its anonymity and collective identity performance, its usage of fan slang as a form of community regulation, and its paratextual production and emotional bonding. Ultimately, the study argues that Cesuo enables alternative forms of digital fandom, emphasizing emotional connection and shared agency over individualized fan identity.

Fan videos (fanvids) represent a crucial aspect of digital fandom production, where fans creatively remix audiovisual content to construct new meanings. Music plays a fundamental role in this process, shaping vids’ narrative structures and emotional responses. One song, Xuanni, has become particularly influential within the Chinese fanvid community. The song has inspired the creation of over 2,000 fan-made videos, with nearly 260 of these surpassing one million views. The proliferation of edited videos has led viewers to adopt various emotional interpretations of Xuanni, influenced by the diverse visual representations. This paper explores the scholarly discourse surrounding fanvids, especially focusing on the role of music usage in them. By critically referencing the theory of self-orientalism, this research further explains the epistemological paradigm behind Xuanni's video creative motivation. Xuanni fanvids center on a form of Chinese ethnocentric self-reflection and identification, serving as a grassroots cultural expression of self-orientalism.