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No, hey, it's that TBT pick from when You War baggy jeans and shell necklaces. Alley word. I'm back with a pop cultural psychological episode. It's going to become very dear to your heart because it's about why something is dear to your heart. First, you're dear to me. Patrons, Thanks for paying a dollar or more a month to submit your questions to ologists. Thanks to everyone who talks and tweets about the show. Thanks to everyone leaving reviews,
which I read every single one. I churned back at you, such as this one written this week by Michigan or Lady t Lav, who wrote, Yeah love Ologies. While sitting in my car in the elementary school pickup lane, I was listening to ologies with my windows down, and as another mom walked by, she shouted, Hey, that's ologies. I got so excited to happen upon another ologite in the wild. I became flum mixed and could only reply, yeah, love ologies.
Finding your own people so fun, Lady t Lav, so timely, you have no idea, So panthropology, let's do this episode? You ready, okay? So Phanthropology is indeed a real term. It was coined by Kristin Longfield, a marketing strategist who used to work at Trailer Park. They make movie trailers and they have a very confusing name if you were
not in the entertainment business. But the fan part of panthropology comes from the word fanatic, which stemmed from the Latin for a temple or a sacred place, and fanatic
meant insanely but divinely inspired. But we have been using it to mean a person who hella dig something since the mid sixteen hundreds, long before we had TV series to gobble up and comic books to love, although, let's be honest, illuminated manuscripts from the Middle Ages kind of like comic books, but with more horses and demon babies and gold leaf. But either way, this ologist happened to meet my now fiance a year or two ago, I think,
and he demanded her business card to give me. And I have wanted to record this episode at least for a year. We're both LA based, and we kept waiting for the pandemic to pass. But alas, we just recently recorded over the phone, and it was such a compelling and interesting look at why we love what we love. We talked for nearly two hours, didn't even take a pee break, to be honest, I just adore her.
So.
She studied communication and culture at Indiana University Gohoosias and got her masters at UCLA and Critical Media Studies and Fan Studies. She has been consulting and on staff as an anthropologist and a researcher at marketing firms and entertainment companies. She runs her own called Random Machine. We talked so long about so many things that y'all love that I could not cut this down into a single episode. So
feast your ears on a delicious two parter. Next week, we're going to dive in even more into stands versus fans, where's the line, shipping people, toxic fandoms, formulas on attaining Internet fame, and this episode you're about to hear we lay all the groundwork talking about the history of fandoms, what a fandom even is, Disney bounding her favorite things, and sports versus art fanatics, kpop politics, Trekki's Star Wars prequels, the Curse of the Algorithm, and what to do when
your favorite books are penned by problematic trolls, creating your own fan base, self identifying morality, all kinds of stuff. So cozy up and get to know and love behavioral researcher and legit professional on her business card un ironically panthropologist Meredith Levine.
I am Meredith Levine and my pronouns are she her great?
Now you are a panthropologist, I am You're the first anthropologist I have ever heard of? Are you the only one on Earth?
I am, by no means the only one on Earth? In fact, the title is not even of my origin. The title I heard at while I was still in graduate school. I went to a session with a woman named Chris who was working at trailer park at the time, who now has her own consultancy called Panthropology. He and it matched onto what I was studying at the time and said, hey, I want to do that for a living m hm. And so it stuck with me for the last ten years of my professional career.
It's so perfect. I love that it just kind of says everything. And it's also is anthropological, right it is.
And I use a lot of mixed methods research in my work. Increasingly I'm using a lot of analytics dashboards on social platforms. But I have done participant observation, I have done a quantitative research. I have done survey design and focus groups and all sorts of other methods that researchers would use in the field, and a lot of it is qualitative interpretation and very anthropological.
Are you a fan of any particular thing that you feel like really has grasped your heart?
Yes?
Okay?
And my origin story of panthropology dates back to age thirteen with a research project in middle school, so there's a long history there as far as the professional interest is concerned. But my current fandoms are a little sad right now, as are many people's fandoms because I'm a fan of Disney theme parks, Hugh, and so they're a little sad right now, but that's okay. It needs to
be in order to be safe. Increasingly, I'm fans of fewer things just because of the nature of the experience of being a fan and how tied it is into identity. So I like to say I'm a fan of fans, and my two biggest fandoms are Disney theme parks and nerd Fightia, which is the fandom centered around the Internet properties of John and Hank Green, especially the blog brothers.
Hank and John Green, if you don't know of them, have built a bit of a media empire after starting a log channel together in two thousand and seven, and they now have several channels under their umbrella, like Hank's SI Show. They're also both prolific writers. John is the
author of The Fault in Our Stars. They have many titles between them and the fundraise for their charity, which is called The Foundation to Decrease World Suck, and they are essentially trying to make the Internet closer to the happiest place on Earth. Oh along those lines. Have you ever Disney bounded?
I have Disney bounded, and I've also done cosplay, And one of my favorite personal fan memories is several years back, I did a costume of the tightrope walker from the Haunted Mansion ride Oh My God and Bob and went during Halloween, which is one of the only times where when you get the extra ticket, adults can wear costumes in the park, And so I got to wear the costume in front of the Haunted Mansion and I have some great photos from that.
This tightrope Walker, I looked it up, is in a petticoated dress and holds a parasol and when the elevator drops sorry spoiler alert for the Haunted Mansion, you see that she's balanced on a rope right above the gaping jaws of a gator. What a costume.
I'm not a professional cosplayer by any means, or a professional Disney bounder, but yes I have. I have done those things.
Would you ever want any of your ashes scattered in the Haunted Mansion, even knowing that someone would just vacuum it up at the end of the day.
No, because I know that people vacuum it up at the end of the day.
They know that though at this point they know that maybe there might be an iota of them left right, Yeah, okay.
Try and do this a non zero amount. And one of the most interesting things about the Haunted Mansion is their air filtration system is so good that they have to keep faking the like dust. It's genuinely a really great air filtration system.
Oh my god. Okay, so you're thirteen years old. When I was thirteen, like digital media did not exist. We had, you know, laser discs or something. But at thirteen, what was your middle school project?
So I went to a middle school in Los Angeles and we had a project called the Eye Search, which was designed to teach us about research methodologies. M It was a year long project where we got to choose our topic and then proceed to research it with a list of methodologies we had to do with like minimum levels of kinds of sources and do primary research and secondary research. And at the time, the first three Harry Potter books had come out, and mind you, I was
not doing a research project on Harry Potter. I was doing a research project on Harry Potter fandom.
Some person could explode, ah and I could sense that there was a there there because of the midnight book parties that were starting to happen.
At bookstores and the way it was sweeping through students at the school. And so my twelve year old, thirteen year old self went the route of, well, clearly, we like this because it taps into archetypal characters and personality types, which is like the angle I went form HM as thirteen year old me, which as thirty something year old me, I was not super far off nice because of the way that archetypal characters cater to our our abilities to
project our identities into them. It turns out the fandom is very identity based. But that's where it started. I knew there was a there there. I read the only two nonfiction full length books about Harry Potter at the time. One was a guidebook to all of the like Wickan and Witchcraft references, and the other was how to teach It in school's source book for English teachers.
Ah, you know, we did a Potterology episode about by chemist in Nebraska who uses Potter spells to talk about high level chemistry, which is really cool.
That is really cool.
Yeah, she's very passionate it side note I have since added a disclaimer on that episode's show notes that says, since this episode was first released, JK. Rowling has said and written some deeply transphobic sentiments, and for this Ali no longer stands nor supports her. So in listening to this episode, let's marvel at theologists herself and her love of chemistry, and remember that feminism is intersectional, and trans women are women, and trans folks are welcome and beloved
in the ologies universe. Okay, let's talk about fictitious people. When you talk about archetypal characters, is there some basis or is there some correlation between like what personality psychologists find, like you know and E and j R.
Like yeah, yeah, Myers Briggs type yes, thank you. So in I haven't gone the psychological route, but I had the opportunity to work on an amazing study in twenty sixteen under the guidance of a business anthropologist named Susan Kresnica. She's amazing and a genius, and we did a year long study of fans and fandom about what the experience of being a fan is at its most essential levels and how being fans differ depending on what you're a
fan of. And the framework we used for that was moral foundations theory, the framework established by Jonathan Height in his book The Righteous Mind.
For a deeper dive a link that Jonathan Hyde book The Righteous Mind why good people are divided by politics and religion. But as for right now, I will just scream yes, why why why? Why? Though into the sky and Meredith explains and so fandoms do differ based on the way they perceive morality in the world.
Fandom is a proxy for or our identities. So where do archetypal characters fit in our abilities to see ourselves reflected or our future selves reflected? Because aspects of identity are different depending on what people are fanus of. So like sports fandom has a very interesting sense of placemaking that media fandom and music fandom does not necessarily have.
And what is placemaking exactly.
It's ties to space. So with sports fans, often they are fans because they were born into it based on where they grew up. Yeah, I'm saying they because I'm not specifically a sports fan, but I totally understand it because it's where you grew up. Oftentimes people are born into it, and it's a family tradition, which case, being a fan of a team from home helps contribute to
a sense of home. We've also seen in some of the research that we did that fans sports fans will also adopt new teams if they're moving to new homes as a way to feel more at home in the new place they're in and connect with other people who are in that new place.
Have you ever done any studies on why sports fanatics in general use the first person plural when we are gonna win or they're going to win with we're at home, we're eating nachos, we are absolutely not doing any physical exertion. Why is it a wei.
Because it's so it's such a proxy for identity. Okay, like going down the street wearing a jersey, you see someone else wearing the same jersey and there's a sense
of kinship there. Same thing with like if you're on a date or at a networking mixer or something and someone's wearing like jewelry that's oddly specific to a very niche thing, and you notice it's we're finding our like minded people and expressing ourselves and the way we use fandom, and this was such an interesting thing from this study is oftentimes it's to express ourselves, but also to build community and to create self care rituals in terms of
yeah like mood regulation and experiencing feelings in a safe way as preparation for real world feelings, and exploring new feelings as a way to get a full range of human emotions. One of the frameworks we thought of in the beginning that is often talked about in the fans studies discourse is if fandom is a proxy for religion. There are reasons why they're similar, there are reasons why they're different.
Meredith says that while sports might make you feel belonging to a certain set of values about right or wrong or particular rituals, religion requires, for the most part, unwavering faith and spirituality. And religion also address things like life after death philosophies you're not gonna get from wearing a hat shaped like cheese. My gosh, I have I have so many questions for you. I'm so sorry interesting ask and you.
Can edit this part out, but like I've got nothing but time today, so much times you want to take I am happy to chat.
That's right, my babies, this is gonna be a two parter about why we love things. Okay, I'm gonna double back. Exactly what is fandom? It's such a basic question, but like, what is it? How do you define just like liking something versus being a fan.
So we asked that question in the research under Susan's research.
And.
One can like something and not be a fan of it, and one can identify as a fan of it. Fandom is the portmanteau of fanatic and kingdom or dom as the suffix of like realm of wow. Okay, And it was first used to in religious contexts, and then it was used in baseball, and now it's used mostly in media.
And so fandom has a few different definitions. There's fandom with a capital F when you're saying, like the fandom, which is generally in reference to a group of media fans who express a certain set of behaviors that largely revolve around transformative works and cultures and fan labor and creativity. This is when you think of like fan fiction and shipping and that sort of thing is associated with the fandom, which can be ip specific or in general based on
these practices. But then you have fandom which can be a proxy for the experience of being a fan, because that's a mouthful or any community of fans. So like, not all sports fans will say they're part of a fandom. Yeah, they'll say they're a fan of this thing, right, whereas fandom is more commonly used in those spaces of transformative works and cultures like.
Books and movie franchises. Okay, that makes sense. And then when it comes again to those like archetypes and identities, do you find that there are certain archetypes that keep getting repeated, Like I remember, do you remember the show Gilligan's Island. Have you ever heard this theory?
No?
Please tell me the theory.
The theory that each of the seven people on Gilligan's Island represents a sin from the Bible, from sloth to to greed. I'm going to run through these really fast, Coveting mister Howell Anger, Missus Howell, Lust, Ginger, Gluttony, the Skipper, Envy, Mary Anne, Sloth, Gilligan, and Pride the Professor. Pride is also vanity, which I didn't know, but that's what a size are for. So it's like they all represent a sin and they're in purgatory. I don't know if you remember that's.
A great theory following so far.
But you know, are there certain kind of stamps of people that when people are creating, you know, fictional works, they know this is a part of our personality that is going to really identify with this character. Like do we identify with all the characters because of different facets within ourselves, or do typically people find a character that they say, I'm I'm a Carriac solo, Yeah, I'm a carry exactly.
Yeah, it's so personal. It's so personal because it's how someone sees themselves. Right now, my husband and I are watching Frasier for the first time.
As good evening, Dr Crane, Doctor Sterna.
It's nice to see you again, and everyone there is so relatable to us. But I can also understand how that's not the case for a lot of people, and so it really depends on sense of self and how people conceive of themselves and how their identities change over time and their value systems change over time. For example, like I am a Hermione, but also I'm not a Gryffindor they're seeing yourself in characters. But then there's also the world building and the negative space to play around in.
And one of the things that we love about Frasier right now is how much negative space there is and so in. In the history of fan studies, one of the typical examples of more is not always better, Sometimes more is just more is Midichlorians in Star Wars. It's the Prequels.
Midchlorians are a microscopic life form that resides, but then all living sounds.
They live inside me, inside yourselves.
Yes, and we are symbions with them, symbians life forms living together for mutual advantage. Without the Medichlorians, life cannot exist and be bit of no knowledge of the force. They continually speak to us, telling us the.
Will of the force.
So from what I gather, your Medicchlorians are kind of like your microbiome, but instead of good poops and more serotonin, you can like perform telekinesis. Now you can check out the Microbiology episode to learn how your gut party works on Earth if you were not a Jedi. Night and Jarrett would also like to add that Medicchlorians sounds too much like mitochondria, and he thinks it's too on the nose, like come on, Richer.
I think, thank you cool people did not want to know how the Force worked. We did not need this information. This was too much information because it squeezed out room for imagination. Mm hmmm, Like it squeezed all of the imagination out of it. We did not need a canonical explanation of like why the force exists because our conceptions
of it and thoughts around it. We're doing so much of a service two fans that the explanation was one worse than what we would think of, and two filling in this vital negative space where fans can project and imagine.
Ah, got it, That makes so much sense. And so Fraser has a lot of negative space.
It has a lot of negative space. It's a show with like like we're I don't know halfway through season one and one of the characters' wives is referenced and we never meet her and we don't see her, like she's just like talked about while she's not in the room. And there's a lot of negative space there to imagine and play. And the same is true. This is why
a lot of like multiverse time travel genre fair. Also, it's one of the reasons why I think that that pulls so much fandom is because when you have that, when you have a very nebulous metaphor for others and outsiders, as like aliens tend to be, there's infinite possibilities right to play.
Is that why maybe sci fi and you know, Star Trek, Star Wars, Rick and Morty has maybe a more engaged or zealous fandom because it lets their mind run around within the universe.
Yes, and also infrastructure, So Star Wars is, Star Wars and Star Trek have two different kinds of infrastructure built around them, and fan scholars will all cite a book called Enterprising Women about the history of female Star Trek fans right and the role of that.
This was the nineteen ninety two publication Enterprising Women, Television Fandom and the Creation of Popular Myth by Camille Bacon Smith, who examined how fan fiction written by women was often derided and even prominent, proficient or roic female characters have been frowned upon as being too unrealistic. And this trope is called a mary sue and it's a complex issue in fan fix circles, I found out by reading too many blocks.
But oftentimes finding fans in like the seventies and eighties of nerd culture stuff. It was still a time when well roundedness in people was a desired trait as opposed to being well lopsided.
Oh okay, whereas.
In a narrow casted world where everything is niche, being well lopsided can be a way to find a community. And so sci fi also has this culture of gathering and of sharing of zines and like home edits of VHS tapes and having conventions. Pulp and science fiction literature have had conventions since like the early nineteen hundreds, and so there were gathering places and ways to meet people who were similar to you. And with that came a lot of safe havens for people who may not have
had other safe havens. So like the comic book shop was a place for nerds to go and be welcome. Someone has mixed an amazing Spider manning with the Peter Parker The Spectacular Spider Man series is not stand as opposed to school where that may not have been the case, or home or that may not have been the case. And so there is this community building element to it as well.
And how do you feel about the sustainability of that community building as niche? Is there any part of you that's watched geek culture and nerd culture be commodified to where it's no longer something that is a subculture.
Yeah, this is in parallel with media history. So sports fandom can be inherited because sports teams have been around long enough to be inherited. We're just now hitting the point where media franchises can be inherited. So like Disney has been inherited for generations.
Mmm, like go to.
Disneyland, go to Disney World, and grandparents are just as much fans as their four year old grandchildren mm hm. And so there's a lot of longevity there because it's intergenerational and can be taught from parent to child and part of home culture. Where sports fandom generally was part of home culture. It was broadcast on televisions and people
would gather in bars, and so there's that. But now we're hitting a point in media history and media distribution where something that wasn't on the air or isn't on the air anymore, can discover new fandom.
For example, binging old Fraser episodes at the touch of a button without needing a film archivist and a dusty projector or is.
Around in franchise form to be discovered and rediscovered by generation after generation, and so now we're in the point where media can be big more mainstream fans in general, especially with properties that have been around for more than ten years, that have robust cultures around them, that are pretty easy to find somebody else who likes those things all of Star Wars, Star Trek, doctor who right, supernatural, that sort of thing.
Oh, I forgot to ask, what Harry potterhouse are you? You're not Gryffindor.
I'm not Gryffindor.
I am.
I'm a raven Claw. And if I had to pick a second house, it would be Slytherin.
From my limited knowledge, I think you are a raven Claw. You're so like academic and brainy and analytical and smart. But that is me only knowing you for fifteen twenty minutes. But my limited.
Knowledge, I'm definitely a knowledge for the sake of knowledge
kind of person. And then I think the secondary trait might be ambition, which gets a really bad rap it Harry as an unreliable narrator, and the things I could say about Harry Potter fandom also of like what happens when you have a body of work that trains a generation of people to be activist because of the themes in the text and like what it's actually representing to people at a young age, only to be expanded, commodified and lose those activist undertones in the narrative itself, and
also like the author, And so basically a generation of fans were raised to be more liberal than the franchise was willing or able to sustain.
Yeah, greater than the some of its parts. Yeah.
Yeah.
And I was going to ask how you felt about that, because I know so many people who grew up on it are not disappointed but devastated rightfully by the personal choices that the authors made and opinions that in platforms. Is there any kind of grief of identity or disillusionment that you have noticed or felt? Yes, yeah, I'd call that a big years.
It's mourning the loss of what was a big part of one's identity. Because we have all these frameworks and in all of this cultural shorthand amongst a generation of people who were raised on these texts who now have the question of should this be an inner generational ip? Do I teach this to my children? Where is the merit of the story versus all of the stuff surrounding the story, and what are the ethics of financially supporting an institution that people no longer agree with?
Hm, I'm so disheartened by it and grossed out, But it's not woven into necessarily my history the way it is you know, some other people's. But that was definitely a question we got from patrons. It's like, what do you do especially since things like appropriating indigenous language about spirit animals. It's like, well, patronis is a better way
to say that? And now it's like, you know, like there's all these shorthands that felt like a safe, inclusive space that no longer feels that way, you know.
Yeah, And the question is also like how much how much does the infrastructure behind the IP and the author impact the experience of the IP? And from a literate media perspective, it's, well, the answer to that is a lot because of how the intersection of media and storytelling and commerce of like, well, do you support the Fantastic Beast franchise as a result or not? Do you continue
to by merch or not? Or do you only by merch by like fan artists, or to what extent is this artist making livelihoods and where does all of that intersect, And all of that is deeply personal and very complicated, and I wish there was a good right answer, but the answer is it's deeply personal and really complicated.
Yeah, so from what I understand, it's really complicated and deeply personal. I mean, real talk. Would it be easier if she were not alive? Still, I'm not in any way talking about putting a hit on her. I hope she knows what I mean? Does she know what I mean? Do you know what I mean?
Yeah?
The way it is to separate the art from the artist in posthumous works, you know.
Yeah, I mean maybe there's also the like John Green notion of books belong to their readers, of like the author doesn't matter. So also it depends on the kind of fan one is, and if authorial intent matters, or is only what matters? What's what ended up on the page?
Right? That's so interesting. You know, you mentioned really early on something about a kind of moral parallel to the fandoms that you choose. Can you tell me a little bit more about that? What fandoms tend to have? What ideals?
Yeah, so media fandoms tend to be a little bit more liberal and activist.
M h.
Sports fandoms tend to be a little bit more conservative.
Okay.
Music fandoms tend to be very like live and let live.
Okay.
Music fandoms also like really experience flow states from their fandoms.
Oh what does that mean?
So like a scholar whose name I'm about to butcher, that's okay, me hichink sent me high.
Okay.
Did a lot of research on flow states, and with music, it's easy to like be at a concert or be listening to an album or something and feel the state of timelessness, effortlessness, sensory richness.
This was discussed in the book Stealing Fire by Steven Kohler and Jamie Wheel, who called this flow state stir st er selflessness, like a sense of self disappears, timelessness, hours just seem like minutes, microseconds can drag on and you can see them in vivid detail. Effortlessness and are for richness, gaining a lot of in and insight and really vivid detail. Again. So, according to their book, getting into this flow state increases creativity and productivity by four
hundred percent. So sick jams the cure for what ails.
Us when you have a moment where the world feels bigger than yourself and you feel connected as like just one tiny piece of this giant electric experience of life. Yeah, and that everything just kind of melts away for a little bit.
Yeah.
There's a book called Stealing Fire all about this and how people get to this state. Music is one of those things, so are like adrenaline junkie type things like base jumping or skydiving. So our meditation is like the slow, long road. Drugs are the fast kind of dangerous road. There are a lot of ways to achieve this state, and it's one of those states that people genuinely love being in.
Maybe because of that, do fanthropologists think that music fans are less judgmental?
Yeah, a little bit, I mean now, So the Internet also has changed a lot of that experience for some kinds of fans, depending on how Internet literate they are and how organized an activist they are, and so, like K pop fans are really good, and this past year has shown just how good K pop fans are, like organizing for something outside of their cause in order to wreak a little pro social trolling on parts of the Internet that they do not agree.
With such goblins for good, cobblins for good.
Yeah, like they're a delight. They are a delight and a force not to be messed with.
Yes, why is that? Why do you think they're so pro social, so organized, so zealous. I know I have a niece, Sophia, who is a big K pop fan, And what do we find, especially in that age group? Maybe it's under identifying specific is is there a reason why K pop just gets its hooks in people's hearts?
So I haven't done a ton of research on this subject, and I'm sure there are a lot of scholars in the fan study's community who have taken dives extensively into it. But from my more broad experience researching fandom, there's the Internet nature of it and a concept that Henry Jenkins
I think. I think it was Henry Jenkins's coin called pop cosmopolitanism mm HM, which is essentially being a citizen of the world and importing your culture from elsewhere, and that used to be very difficult in the days of anime and manga and like coded vhs per country code, and like needing to mail things, and that used to be prohibitively difficult. But with online spaces. It is now much much easier. There's a lot more of an opening
to what life is like in other places. I mean, K pop and jpop have a little bit more of like an androgenous culture about them. Asian country is also a little bit more like communally oriented. And part of it, I think is just now, like this is all happening at a time when gen Z has access to it. And I was at CS a couple of years ago listening to a longitudinal study about generational differences and gen Z is different from preceding generations because of how pro
social they are. They are much more communally oriented and much less individually minded than prior generations.
Is there any knowledge that you have on how they got that way, because I feel like with the rise of social media in the last you know, thirteen fifteen years, there was such so many drums being beaten about like this is going to be the most narcissistic set of assholes the world has ever raised, and then they're like the most pro social, Like how did how did it happen?
That's a great question. I think part of it has to do with thinking about the cultures of the generations around them and the world that they're inheriting. So like I still was at the tail end of a generation who like played outside in the middle of my street with neighbor kids.
M too.
I don't know to what extent that happens now on supervis I don't have kids, but I would be curious from listeners of the pod like whether or not that's I mean COVID aside like pre COVID, is that still a thing that like parents do because oftentimes with device culture, like the device is the connectivity to friends in absence of geographic communities.
Right, I wondered do parents let their kids play outside? And in googling it, I found out that there are actually laws now making it illegal to just let your kids peace out and hit the park solo, despite crime rates being lower than they were perhaps a generation to go. And I don't have kids. I just have one very hairy daughter and I have to watch her like a
hawk outside so she doesn't feast on katpoo. So we all have different challenges now, speaking of challenges and parenting, each week we donate to a cause of the ologies Choosing and Meredith Chow's partner in helps and the Sierra Leonian Ministry of Health's work to reduce maternal mortality in Sierra Leone's Kno district and that money will go toward everything from hiring more community health workers to building and supplying a maternal care Center of Excellence and a neonatal
intensive care unit. And this effort was organized by the vlog brothers Green and more info about it can be found in the link in the show notes, and that was made possible by sponsors of the show, who I'm going to talk about for a second.
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Okay, back to right interview. So Meredith continued saying that kids finding connection through devices is a double edged sword. It's been great when we needed the physical distance of the last year in particular, but also that the content delivered is controlled algorithmically by the platform itself.
And I could go on and on about algorithmic curation and its role in trends and culture, which is where a lot of my research is now. Oo Oh my gosh, this is where a lot of my re orch is now of like creator culture and algorithmic trends and how that shapes communities and also how that shapes the creative process. Yeah, in influencer culture and parasocial relationships, like that's where a lot of my research is.
Is the thesis that it's fucked or is it set the basic thesis that you are getting people are getting fucked by the algorithm. I feel very lucky that podcasts seem untouched by the algorithm, and I'm knocking on like all of the wood possible, But it seems like the algorithm is like capital T, capital A, and it feels a little bit like a specter.
So yes and no. In prior media eras there was commercial exchange for the piece of media. In a lot of instances, yeah, like movie tickets or live shows or something like that.
In the olden days, you paid dollars of money to see stuff.
Such that having a good end product was the point. Media was a product, and some industries can get away with still treating it that way, especially because the metrics of success often come from a body of peers giving out awards where metrics of success can be decoupled from commercial.
Success, think movies and oscars, maybe even streaming services that are ad free and eligible for Emmys and Academy Awards and Golden Globes and SAG Awards and Toni's and Grammys, So prestige trophies, bragging rights, face masks that match your curture gown, and lots of publicity.
Ah okay, But now we're in a place where the creation of media media is not the point, Like it's not a product, it's a process, because the business models have changed in a lot of instances such that what matters is not the it's the process. Because what's happening is it's an industry of audience development where we're shifting into attention economics here of like what is the value
of an audience who is receptive to messaging. Ah, and this is where it's going to get meta and weird, I guess, because here I am talking about this to you, a professional creator, part of an audience who enjoys listening to you, and maybe it would be happy to hear you read the phone book. But like, there's a lot that goes with that, because there is the process of getting better over time, where like the early work, if revisited,
is noticeably worse, oh yeah, than contemporary work. But that's part of the process and part of the point, because there is this emotional ownership and stake in these businesses because the model is so transparent mm hm, it is without an audience, this work would not exist. Yeah, Versus if you're at like a major film studio. There are a zillion layers between the audience and the creative process. Yeah, because media is viewed as a product, not a process.
And so in those instances where media is a product not a process, it is absolutely counterintuitive to contemporary methods of distribution, namely algorithmically distributed platforms, because measurement is different.
In the Amazing Futurology episode with flash Forwards, Rose evelyth. We talked about the adage coined by a guy named Andrew Lewis, who once mused via a comment on MetaFilter, if you're not paying for it, you're not the customer. You are the product being sold. And attention economy right there in a nutshell, folks, which is one reason why I love Patreon so much. But that's a whole other episode.
Whether you're an advertiser measuring like the impact of a campaign, or a creator like measureasuring success metrics for a YouTuber or podcaster or whatever, they're very different things. If you're concerned with opening box office weekend, that's time bound, it either hits or it doesn't, which is essentially saying, like the viral video strategy, it's either good or it is in't straight out of the gate.
Yeah, as opposed to the platforms providing distribution altering that distribution via algorithms to weigh the better producing or emerging products. Meredith explains, so it's the the person who is disseminating the product is kind of like putting their thumb on the scale, sort of like, well, let's take eyeballs away from this, which is getting mediocre eyeballs, and let's throw those eyeballs on this thing which is getting a little bit better to sort of propel it.
Yeah, or like subcreator made a creative choice to do something different and a fewer percentage of that audience stuck around to care about it. Let's just stop showing that content to those people because clearly they have stopped being interested, regardless of any actions they have taken or not taken to indicate disinterest.
Yeah, that is so terrifying for creators because it's like you to grow as a creator and to keep your fan base and be engaged. It seems like you do need to have growth, you do need to keep things interesting. But at the same time, if you take a creative risk that someone doesn't like, say ten percent of people dip, you could fuck your whole.
Career well, temporarily, temporarily temporarily because with enough persistence, like.
The rebuilding process happens. But like it's like the stock market almost like stuff happens and then people get spooked and then you all show up again, depending on what the thing is. In the nineteen seventies, if you didn't like a creative decision on television, you want to write a letter to a studio, yeah, with no guarantee that anybody would read it. Yeah. And now all that has to happen is a tweet.
Yeah.
And if people are sufficiently unhappy, it's possible to community organize to get a lot of people to tweet. I just read a book called so You've been Publicly Shamed? Just read that one. And it's really interesting because it means that shame can be wielded by communities in any direction, because that's the that's one of the big tools that they have. So like K pop is really interesting right
now because they're not wielding shame. They're wielding randomness like this whole like pictures of pancakes for the million Maga march thing right Like they're wielding internet culture to like derail thing.
Yes, the pen is mightier than the sword, and the meme is mightier than the pen is what we're.
Learning, Yeah, pretty much, pretty much.
Meredith says that businesses are starting to realize that the object of fandom, the influencer or the TikTok star, wouldn't exist as a commodity without the fandom supporting and flocking to and fueling it. So the pandemic brought us to light even further.
And like we're starting to see this with sports a little bit, because there are no stadiums with live sports fans, and so now like where do they congregate and where do they go? And how do these businesses sustain themselves and what happens to their like licensing and merchandising divisions, and like there are all of these networks built up in these business models around communities being able to congregate
mm hm and have these experiences. Now there's threat to identity as much as there is the ability to find and choose and build anuity as well.
How do you feel about names for fandoms like Trekky's Twyhart's ologites, for example. I feel like that's something you can't name yourself, but someone else can name it and then you can go along with it. Where do those come from? How long have those been happening?
I think it's really important personally mm hmm to be able to address the community as a name. They come from a sense of community and a sense of like wanting to actually belong. I mean, ultimately, as humans, we all want to belong, and so I think it's a really important thing to have if it works, like Beyonce
has the beehive and their swifties. There are a lot of them, and sometimes they come from point of origin unknown, possibly a journalist, possibly fans themselves, possibly something that someone said offhand as an object of fandom. I haven't dove super deep into the etymology of names of fandoms, but I think from a community building perspective, it's important.
Mm hm.
You know what would be amazing is if Vonnagut fans called themselves the grand Faloons. Have you ever met a lot of Vonnegut like only in school? Like Vonnaguet used to talk about, a grand falloon is like a group of people who think they're connected, but they're not like hoosiers, but like the grand Ooh, are you a grand Falloon? I am as well. But okay, I just looked on the book website Goodreads and there is a Kurt Vonnegut
fan club and they are called the Kurt Vonnegut Fan Club. Okay, this is a big question I feel like has come up in the last couple of years. People who are called famous for the sake of being famous or famous for being famous. What is the difference between an influencer and a celebrity. I feel like celebrity is still a compliment, but an influencer there's something kind of snide about that. How does that come up in phanthropology?
So the whole study of celebrity and fame m h, it's almost like the inverse of panthropology, where fandom is concerned with the community, and like celebrity fame is object of fandom, but celebrity and fame generally refers to a person okay, rather than like ip okay, so like one could be famous or a celebrity. Helen Zaltzman on The Illusionists had like a great episode of that.
This was the October twenty twenty episode of The Illusionist titled Celebrity. It also happens to feature Hank Green as well. Hello Hank. Also for more of the just phenomenal Helen Zaltzman, you can listen to her Ology's episode, which is Etymology, and you can listen to me fanatic girl over her.
The other thing about like celebrity and fame is oftentimes one of the distinctions he made that I really liked is like, do you care about their personal lives or not? M not everybody cares about the personal lives just the work, like Jennifer Andison is famous, but like, do we care about her personal life? And would you buy a T shirt with her on it?
I mean I do care about her personal life a little bit. I just want for her to be happy and for tabloids to stop painting her a fit, wealthy woman as a tragedy because she didn't have a lot of babies and she went through a divorce. So yes,
maybe I do care a tiny bit. And maybe I did google Jennifer Aniston t shirts and aside from the ninety eight percent of search returns that were just paparazzi photos of her wearing a thin shirt when it was apparently a little chilly out, I did find some shirts with her face on them, and earnestly, there was one that was just wall to wall, all over, full color print of various stages of Aniston and hairstyles, all her
face and no joke. I kind of want to wear this shirt, but I can't decide if it would be like post post post ironic or just too casually vulnerable. Anyway, that is totally up to you.
And like, this is one of those magical things where like the community of people who care, abuse the power and to stuck caring, like willfully stop caring, not just like it fades out of your life. Stop caring is really hard.
You do a lot of work too with brands and cultivating brands, and when you look at fandoms of IP or of people, how do you translate that to kind of encourage at least authenticity.
This is the brand loyalty question.
I didn't even know this was my question, but I love Merit. It's so much for knowing that this was going to come up.
She rolls, like, how does it translate to brands? So most people, many people will have brand loyalty but not identify as a fan because the brand is not a proxy for identity necessarily, like on display proxy of identity if you go into someone's house, which I'm just that kind of nosy person who does like if I'm back back when there used to be dinner parties, I was the kind of person who would absolutely I'll look in the fridge of the host.
I'm telling you I love her.
Like because everything like it. From my perspective, what you own is also a proxy for a value system, which is why aesthetic I think has come up so much in like internet culture of like cottage core or like bohemian, because it's the kind of thing that is a little bit more of a beacon. And there are some assumptions to be made of you based on brands. What does it mean if you have Toms of Maine toothpaste? Is anybody gonna be a fan of Tom's of Main toothpaste?
When I say this, I'm sure someone in the comments will be like, well, I'm a fan of Tom's of Main toothpaste, but really? Or do you just like it? And are using the word fan as a proxy for the idea of liking something? Is it the kind of thing that you would wear, merch for or like talk to other people about? So there is brand loyalty, which largely has to do with did you inherit the brand? Is it what you grew up with? Or does it serve a function for you that such that other brands
can't compete. I was reading some white paper I think that was talking about how we inherit our mother's tampon
brands and like something big has to be different. There either has to be like big innovation such that it makes it a markedly better product, or there is some other factor like price point that shapes a choice other than that choice, which I can say is true for me, and with toothpaste was true for me until my dentist recommended I used toothpaste for sensitive teeth, and then I deviated from my family's inherited brand because of a product a feature of the product, And sometimes it can be
about identity. So like you have like Tom's Shoes, and values based brands, the whole concept of a benefit cor and nonprofits as brands, and like transparency of production.
You know, those feel good, do good brands that we gravitate toward like moths to an energy of fission led light.
Because it turns out that the story of the product is a story that in telling reflects on ourselves. Okay, So like if you were to come into my home, I would tell you the story of our dining room table, which was my grandmother's, which was a Gerald McCabe dining table, which came from a collaboration he did with a furniture maker and an architect in the era of mid century furniture, which was unusual because Gerald McCabe primarily made guitars. Yeah,
but like the table is a table. You've probably seen a lot like it, But the story of the table is more interesting than the object itself. And so are we building social capital for ourselves when we get to tell the story of the brands products, we surround ourselves with bottom which is a different thing than fandom. It's it is personal social capitol building of Like are you a taste maker in your friend's circle? Is this an
interesting story? Is this something that reflects some level of values for you, like conservation and ecology or upcycling or vintage culture, or wellness and holistic medicine. Like if I were to come into a friend's house and it was you know, dreamcatchers and poofs and burning incense, you know that's a whole vibe that communicates like a belief system and a value system.
PS weave the dream catches to indigenous folks as they're an item originating with the Ojibway people and not something you should casually buy cheap knockoffs of or make yourself out of stuff from hobby lobby because it's boho. I'm saying this to make it less awkward. I feel like stakeoms is killing it. I don't know if you've seen stakems on Twitter, but just real chef's kiss. They've just been they it's a frozen beef brand. But whoever they got as their social media manager just goes full on
about like progressive politics. I should say, not so much progressive politics, but pro science sentiments, which I feel like in the heart of twenty twenty's anti mask movement was important. On April six, twenty twenty, Stakom's official verified account tweeted friendly reminder in times of uncertainty and misinformation, anecdotes are not data. Good data is carefully measured and collected information based on a range of subject dependent factors, including, but
not limited to, controlled variables, meta analysis, and randomization. Nineteen thousand retweets, seventy thousand likes who knew twenty twenty could deliver a blast of fresh air from the bullhorn of a really disgusting process to meet product.
So then follow up question to you, have you bought stakhums.
I've thought about it. I've thought about it. Then I'm like, I'm trying to eat less beef, so.
Yeah, like because they're also there's also the like everyone now has to be a publisher, the type mentality that exists with the Internet. That means the product can't stand on its own anymore because now every brand is in the audience development game m hm, and every brand wants fans right like everyone wants fans, right.
I think probably to a point. It's interesting because actually I'm going to make us go through Patreon questions because there are questions I want to ask you that patrons asked, and so I'm going to ask it. There are questions through my mouth. Is that cool?
Great? Okay, let's do it.
So next week we will ask this very smart and lovely person plenty of pretty basic questions, because that's how do it around here now. Whether you're trying to build a brand for yourself or you want to have more perspective on why you like what you do and why you like other people who like what you do, Tune in next week. Trust me, we cover all gods, some really juicy stuff. Meanwhile, you can follow at Meredith Jane on Twitter and on Clubhouse, where she's been leading discussions
on things like fandom and the attention economy. You can follow me Ali Ward at Ali Ward on Twitter and Instagram. We're also at ologies on both. You can join the Facebook Ologies podcast group. Thank you Aaron Talbert for admitting that you can find other ologites in the wild with merch at ologiesmerch dot com. Thank you Shannon Feldis and Bonnie Dutch of the comedy podcast You Are That for
managing that. Thank you Noel Dilworth for helping manage all my shoot and recording schedules, which I'm very bad at. Thanks Emily White and all the transcribers for making transcripts available on our website at aliwar dot com, slash Ologies dash Extras. There's a link to those. They are free. The link is in the show notes, as well as
bleeped episodes. Thank you Caleb Patton for bleeping them. Thank you editors Jared Sleeper, who hosts Core Calisenics every weekday at ninety am Pacific on Twitch, and to Jurassic Park Fanatic and Kitty Lover, Stephen Ray Morris of the podcast see Jurassic Write and the per Cast and the new
Everything but the Movie A Star Wars Books podcast. Nick Thorburn of the very good band Islands wrote and played the theme music and at the end of each episode, I tell a secret, and this week the secret is I was able to get my first Maderna shot this past week because I work on an educational TV show and I can't wear a mask on camera for it, and I travel a lot for it, and I'm really so thrilled to be vaccinated. I can't even tell you. The roll out in California has been a little weird.
Last week they were shelving or throwing away more vaccine doses than they were administering, so there were tons of open Dodger Stadium appointments, and as I was waiting in the car to get the shot, I scrawled thank you and a heart on my arm in Ballpoint pen To surprise, the health check gave me the shot and it was very corny, but they liked it, and I'm glad I did it. In My arm hurt for a couple of days,
but my heart has never been more at ease. So I hope your turn comes soon, and I hope when it does that you take it okay until next week. I'm a fan of you.
Bybye.
Pacodermatology, hobology, ry doo, zoology, lithology, new technology, meteorology, paratology, ethology, ceriology, ethology. I am not one of.
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