Fandom has really become huge since the development of the internet and social networking sites. Here you can find people who are fans of absolutely anything. If you're into something that none of your friends like you can easily find hundreds or thousands of people online that have the same interests as you.
Before online fan communities if someone was interested in something it generally would have died out after awhile if you were the only person interested in it, but now with online fandom you can keep it going for a very long time because there will always be other people online who are into the same things as you.
For me it was David Beckham that I was a huge fan of when I was younger. I had everything that was ever release with him on it. In my bedroom I had what I called my David Beckham wall of fame that was just covered in photos and posters of him. I cut out every single picture of him in every paper and bought every magazine he was in. I even have a David Beckham mug that I still use to this day. My friends would buy me posters of him for my birthday and I had a Man utd jersey with his name and number on the back. I truly was obsessed with him, but after a while my obsession died down. I still love him but not to the extent that I used to. I was the only one of my friends who liked him so much so after a while I really had nothing to keep me going with my fandom. This was all before I knew about the internet and online fan communities and I think if they had of been around then I would have kept it up a lot longer. If I could have gone online and shared all the stuff I had collected on him I think I would have kept doing it. Maybe this picture will help you understand my obsession a bit more..
I think fan culture has definitely contributed to remix culture. That's one of the ways in which fans engage with the objects of their affection. They take music or videos of people they love and put it all together in their own creative way. I wouldn't call it distorting the original, I think these people are very creative and I admire they're ability to do remixes and I think it's great that they are so passionate about something they love. So part of the fan culture is making these remixes and putting them online for people to see and comment on and then to also share what they have done. A great way for people to engage with fandom is twitter. On twitter people can actually engage with celebrities and tweet them in hope of getting a tweet back and a lot of the time they do so this reinforces the fandom. People even name themselves on twitter after the people they admire or use the same surname as them. Facebook pages are also great for famous people to keep their fans up to date by posting photos and events. This way fans can go see them at an event or signing they might be at. One good example of fandom is when the boy band One Direction were filming their latest music video they posted it on twitter that they were going out in London and loads of fan showed up and ended up getting in their music video. I think these outlets on the internet also allow celebrities let their fans know that they really appreciate them so this also reinforces fan culture.
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