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Sociologists of culture studying "fan activism" have noted an apparent increase in its volume, which they attribute to the growing use of the Internet to register fan claims. However, scholars have yet to measure the extent of contemporary fan activism, account for why fan discontent has been expressed through protest, or precisely specify the role of the Internet in this expansion. We argue that these questions can be addressed by drawing on a growing body of work by social movement scholars on "movement societies, " and more particularly on a nascent thread of this approach we develop that theorizes the appropriation of protest practices for causes outside the purview of traditional social movements. Theorizing that the Internet, as a new media, is positioned to accelerate the diffusion of protest practices, we develop and test hypotheses about the use of movement practices for fan activism and other nonpolitical claims online using data on claims made in quasi-random samples of online petitions, boycotts, and e-mailing or letter-writing campaigns. Results are supportive of our hypotheses, showing that diverse claims are being pursued online, including culturally-oriented and consumer-based claims that look very different from traditional social movement claims. Findings have implications for students of social movements, sociologists of culture, and Internet studies.
In 2008, a blog posted a black-and-white photo of protesting Star Trek fans from the 1960s. While the source of the photo is unclear, the photo shows a crowd of mostly younger men holding picket signs supporting Star Trek at a rally in front of NBC studios. Jenkins (1992) wrote about these ardent fans, who transformed their enthusiasm for Star Trek into a campaign to convince NBC to save "their" show, and their online brethren from a few decades later, arguing that the activism of fans should lead scholars to even more aggressively question the passivity of authences (Radway 1984; see Bielby and Bielby 2004 for a summary of this literature) and the passivity of consumers (Earl and Schussman 2007; Jenkins 1992, 2006).
Aside from the messages on the signs, the photo is virtually indistinguishable from photos of other protest rallies from the 1960s. But, while you can find a large number of such photos for the civil rights movement, the women's movement, the anti-war...