Fans existed before the Internet. Sports fans existed. Music fans existed. Fans of any entertainment culture existed. But before the Internet, how were those cultures cataloged and preserved? They were cataloged in historical perspective. For example, a simple search of the words “Baseball,” “Fan,” and “History” in the catalog of the Library of Congress reveals this form of record keeping. See the results here.
Records of fandom from generations prior to the Digital age are generally secondary. They feature books like Fred Stein’s History of the Baseball Fan and Donald Dewey’s 10th Man: The Fan in Baseball History. While books such as these rely on historical materials, they are selections of the cultural archives represented by the fan-groups. They are removed from the contexts in which they were created and edited and collated to fit the agenda of the author.
Some physical archives of fandom exist. For example, the Duke University Archives retains a collection of information on Krzyzewskiville, a fan-inhabited “tent city” populated during the winter as a line for admission to campus basketball games. These archives, however, are mostly historical archives and records of events. They do not preserve the interactions among fans, and this is the primary distinction between the digital archivization of fandom and those archives of fan cultures that preceded it. For fan cultures, digital technologies archive the first-hand interactions of fans.
The first example is one with which I am personally familiar (and admittedly biased toward, as a fan myself), called the Duke Basketball Report (www.dukebasketballreport.com). The Duke Basketball Report (DBR), is a fan-operated site designed to provide information about and a forum of discussion for, primarily, the Duke Men’s Basketball program, with a secondary emphasis on all Duke University sports. The DBR exists in an interesting space within the dynamic between popular entity and the fans who support it. Duke University has a sanctioned, University-operated athletic website, www.GoDuke.com, as well as a men’s basketball program-operated website, www.DukeBluePlanet.com. DBR, however, is an independent and fan-run website, meaning its existence is a product of Duke Basketball’s fans. Could DBR have existed before the Internet? Certainly not in the form in which it currently exists. Not in the sense that it could not exist as a website, which, without the Internet, it obviously could not exist. However, without the Internet, the Duke Basketball Report could not have existed as a daily updated repository of globally produced information on Duke Basketball, produced by people unaffiliated with the program itself, and accessible anywhere in the world by anyone with an Internet connection. The Internet created this archive of Duke Basketbal information as well as this archive of Duke Basketball fandom.
In addition to the content linked to and regularly produced by the editors of the Duke Basketball Report themselves, DBR also has a common feature on many fan sites, and websites and general, known as a forum. Forums serve as a sort of online messaging system in which users can add their own thoughts and insights on site-related (or sometimes unrelated) topics. At current count (December 16, 2009), the DBR forums features 14,168 discussiong “threads” containing a total of 325,241 posts. That’s a lot of fan conversations. And while those conversations (or similar ones) might have existed regardless of the Internet and the Duke Basketball Report, the Internet has archived and preserved them.
I offer the Duke Basketball Report as only one example of thousands of fan websites, with more being created daily. Fan websites exist for nearly every major sporting team, as well as for any number of other organizations and activities, from bands (www.beatlesfans.com) to fictional characters (www.mugglenet.com). The Internet, regardless of whether or not it creates the fans or the cultural content those fans produce, is responsible for the archivization and preservation of that cultural content, enabling the Internet to represent an archive of human cultural activities that had, previously, a limited archivization, if any archivization at all.
