Spend more than five minutes on the internet, and you’ll notice two things. One, people spend an inordinate amount of time and effort dissecting and discussing entertainment media; and two, very little of that discussion is healthy. At best, the activity is a thin veneer of shared interest that hype-mongers the newest installment of a franchise. At worse, the community metastasizes into a self-regulating, high control group that functions almost cultishly, shibboleths and rituals reinforcing commitment to the community’s core dogma.
The neologism for a community organized around a shared passion for a given instance of entertainment media is a “fandom”, a place where people can share their hobbies and passions with like-minded people. But our fractious digital lives have sundered fandoms from their analog antecedents — communities of actual humans in physical proximity. Fandoms are nothing more than modern-day bowling clubs, neighborhood ball teams, jazz bands, or churches, except that they forsake face-to-face biological communication for the vastly increased scale of digital interaction.
In many ways, that’s an improvement; the digital world allowed me to join robust communities of sci-fi readers and game design nerds that I’d never have found otherwise. But this futuristic community model is self-defeating: the same digital technologies which enable fandoms also fuel polarization, misinformation, and partisanship within them.
One antidote to the toxicity of fandoms is to manifest the traits of healthy analog communities, whose wisdom has been developed over decades (or centuries) of umpire huddles, jazz soloist drama, and rabbinic debates. Therefore, I propose the following traits of a healthy community fandom, deriving in part from the writing of Jean Vanier, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, and others:
1. Communities exist for their members’ holistic growth.
A community exists for growth — not growth in number or size or influence, but the members’ growth as individuals and citizens. Why join a chess club, if not to get better at chess and become a better sportsperson? Why join a neighborhood committee if not to provide opportunities for the families to grow? Why join a fandom if not to learn more about one’s passion and to allow it to change oneself, i.e. to grow? Even participation in the meme-focused fandoms of Reddit absorbs others’ humorous perspectives on a shared passion, an implicit agreement to slowly change and be changed by repeated exposure to the Other.
All healthy, thick communities, including fandoms, enable the holistic growth of their members. A thin community founded on mere coincidence (for example, co-workers with a shared cafeteria, or strangers watching a movie premiere together) is not necessarily a bad thing; after all, there’s only so much social energy we humans can expend. But thin communities are more fragile, susceptible to schism, and since fandoms are often communities we elect to participate in during our free time, these can and should be healthy spaces that enrich us, repaying us manyfold for the time and effort we invest in them.
2. A healthy community is eternally curious.
Fandoms which provide growth to their members are definitionally curious — they seek to learn more about the objective facts concerning their shared passion, yes, but they are also curious about the subjective qualities of their passion as embodied in the diversity of its members. This curiosity brings an everflowing fount of new ideas, knowledge, and perspective into the community; it centers the newcomer as a core member of the community; it enables the maturation of the veteran community members as their ideas are brought into ever-fresh contact with the Other.
A thin community is incurious and results-oriented, interested only in winning an argument, deciding the outcome of a game, or rigidly defining a canon. A thick, healthy community is more interested in the journey than the destination, and it celebrates every step in that journey as an opportunity for growth.
3. A curious community is one that listens well, even to dissent.
The prerequisite to curiosity in a community is the skill of listening. This involves a certain amount of empathy which is hampered by the impersonal nature of virtual interaction. Nevertheless, a thick community is one that is always interested in learning from another perspective.
The most important kind of perspective for a community to hear is dissent. Dissent keeps a group from ossifying unhealthy habits or a flawed status quo. Whether it’s opinions about the optimal strategy for a game, or a novel interpretation of a musical passage, or even concerns about the power structure of the community, this feedback loop of dissent is what enables communities to identify and overcome their weaknesses. (Readers of Bakhtin will recognize this as the concept of polyphony.) Mature members will even adopt a listening posture as they dissent, with plenty of empathy for others and a loosely-held humility that isn’t interested in being proven right.
Unhealthy groups deal with dissent in one of two ways. On one hand, they might relentlessly quash all dissent, leading to a self-regulating group that is incapable of hearing criticism. This is the habit of many NFT communities, who ridicule and ostracize community members who voice suspicions that they might be victims of a greater-fool scam. Another extreme is to overreact to the positive effect of dissent, enshrining it for its own sake, generating a feedback loop of counterproductive and negative comments in the name of “being honest.” These communities are hostile to newcomers because they’re simply no fun to be around, and so the community either generates newcomers by peddling ever-more-extreme views (which is how racist and sexist ideologies permeated the most visible criticisms of the latest Star Wars trilogy), or it fades into obscurity (e.g., the haters ofWaterworld).
4. A community that listens well will engage the real-world context of their passions.
If dissent is the most important perspective for a community, then the most important dissent concerns the real-life implications and context of the community’s passion. Yes, many fandoms are passionate about “fake” things — classical music, Surrealist art, short stories, the Klingon language — that do not directly represent historical or cultural realities. But even the in ficta imaginings of an artist occurred within a real context, and the stories they tell can take on the power of myth, shaping the actions and beliefs of their fans. Fake things can still matter.
It is important, therefore, for opera nerds to wrestle with the nationalist themes of Wagner co-opted by Nazi Germany. It is important for comics readers to talk about “refrigeration” of sexualized female characters. It is important to recognize the injustice when white actors play minority characters. It is important when the dominant reading of a piece of fiction promotes an inhumane ideology. To call attention to these real-world implications of in ficta events is to dissent from the naïve passion of immature communities; in other words, this is how a community grows.
Honest, curious listening to this real-world dissent keeps a group grounded in the real world. It prevents a community from becoming blinded by their passion for fictional events with the “positive vibes only!” or “keep politics out of this” mindsets that eventually grow into cultish self-regulation. Careful attention to the real-world context of fiction enables the process of growth.
5. A fandom that listens well will dethrone the primacy of creative differences.
When groups take their fictional passion too seriously, or mistake arrogant criticism for humble dissent, the effect is a spiral of negativity that treats their view of the fiction as sacred. The in ficta events of fiction are indeed important due to their real-world context, as emphasized in the prior trait. But to say that the fictional event is equally valuable outside of its context is like saying a particular cinderblock is just as important as the load-bearing wall it comprises.
Taking these fictional events too seriously creates the possibility of “victimized” attitudes among community members, who take personal offense any time they disagree with a creative decision, as if that single context-less decision were as important as the total work’s situation in the real world of sexism and racism and abuse of power. Then, that “victim” bases their participation in the community on their perceived injustices, twisting every interaction into an opportunity to air their grievance.
This is the height of solipsistic stupidity. Even if someone disagrees with a creative decision or its execution, they are not entitled to demand that all common activity focus on their disagreements. They are not entitled for their favorite character to find true love. They are not entitled to their ideal casting decisions. They are not entitled to a murder mystery entirely free of plot holes.
A healthy community will not hesitate to engage fiercely with a creative decision if new information exposes real-world contextual layers (for example, when Go Set A Watchman revealed the chauvinist and racist attitudes of Atticus Finch). And healthy community members are able to name the creative flaws in their passion. But they do so by being curious and listening; they ask questions of others in the community and they interrogate the work itself with an open mind. And if they are still unsatisfied, then they adopt the position of the empathetic, listening dissenter — they will voice their dissent when appropriate, but never from a place of spite or entitlement. It all returns to growth.
6. An engaged community has clear, rigorously enforced boundaries.
A healthy community will inevitably enter internal and external conflicts — any curious being will eventually stumble into trouble, after all, and a community is no exception. Many of these conflicts can be resolved by listening well, speaking humbly, voicing dissent, and prioritizing growth.
Sometimes, though, this is not possible. Sometimes a community member insists that their words are dissent, even as others perceive them to be self-serving complaint. Or perhaps a new member instigates arguments with ad hominem attacks and is single-mindedly focused on winning those arguments. Invested community members have tried to intervene, to no avail.
At this point, many online fandoms can do nothing more. Their communities are simply too large to effectively moderate. Or perhaps the laissez-faire attitude of digital freedom of speech makes the policies of content moderation toothless. At any rate, the toxic members are allowed to slowly shift the flow of ideas away from a flourishing growth mindset to one rigidly defined by tribal sets of opinions. (Welcome to the Star Wars fandom, by the way.)
Healthy communities, however, will define clear boundaries for their community. Often, these boundaries limit the scope of the group, too, so that its membership doesn’t get inhumanly large. But the boundaries always define the expectations of the community, making it clear that communities require protection of the members. Dissent will be heard, but the core members of the community will be protected at all costs. (When real-life communities are centered around our most vulnerable siblings, such as the L’Arche communities, this protection is an existential necessity.)
For fandoms, the core members of the community are those who provide the source of growth — the humble and empathetic dissenters who provide contrasting viewpoints, the newcomers who bring a fresh outlook, and those who offer marginalized perspectives on the real-world context of the group’s passion. If veteran community members shame those with minority opinions, or gatekeep the newer members, or lash out at other veterans, or belittle the real-world implications of the fiction, then they threaten the principle of growth upon which the community is built, and the community should take action. Temporary or permanent bans, privilege revocation, and other measures are especially useful in digital communities for the simple reason that there’s always analog communities readily available, so fandom participation should be seen as a privilege, not an entitlement.
Healthy communities are formed with clear boundaries around those who are curious and those who listen, a group sensitive to the real-world context of their passion but never victimized by creative differences. These traits help to promote holistic growth in the members of the community, a positive feedback loop which spirals into human flourishing at small and large scales.