Conflict is uncomfortable… yet necessary, at least in the case of my research and submission to the Digital Anthropology group, DANG, panel for the American Anthropological Association (AAA) 2013 meeting. In Chicago this year, I’m hoping to share my findings about the ways in which a fandom encounters and uses conflict between members to refine the values they espouse.

“It boils down to respect”:

Defining the values of a fandom through conflict online

Increasingly, social media allows users to connect their online behaviors to physical practices in pursuit of collective goals. In these digital public spaces, communities of practice are able to bypass geographic and temporal boundaries. For U.S. Women National soccer team (USWNT) fans, Tumblr offers a digital realm in which multimodal communication unfolds – and quite often, conflict arises. Through online ethnography and discourse analysis, this study examines conflict as essential to refining USWNT fandom values; however, conflict also jeopardizes the participatory practices that define the fandom.

This community of practice can be explored as a collaborative project that incorporates wider discourses of gender, sport, and nation. USWNT fans share media from first-hand experiences, as well as produce user-generated content. Fan-users also broadcast requests to the fandom, display insider knowledge, and articulate meaning in belonging to the fandom. Subjects spurring USWNT fandom conflict include source attribution and rules for appropriately tagging content. Frustrations about these points of conflict threaten archiving and sharing habits, which in turn threaten to dry one data stream through which “fandom” knowledge is quenched.

Considering the future of open access and linked communities, the current justifications fan-users apply toward the perceptions of ethical responsibilities in the fandom may be instructive. This paper also considers methodological and ethical challenges in researching asynchronous communication in a dynamic digital space. The ways in which the USWNT fandom “does” conflict may offer insight into the ways digitally mediated behaviors could inform practices and discursive spaces of future engagements and conflict resolution.