‘My whole world shifted’: Identity and transformation in becoming-a-fan narratives
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Based on a multi-site ethnography and participant interviews with fans of The Beatles (primarily John Lennon) and Johnny Cash, this article discusses transformational accounts of becoming-a-fan narratives. Fan interviews took place during two intervals: in the fall of 2013 and winter 2014, and in winter and spring 2019. A primary focus is Sandvoss’s conception of the ‘extension of the self’ concerning the object of a fan’s devotion. Extensions of the self operate to reaffirm the fan’s sense of self and inform identification with the celebrity. To clarify this concept, this article considers ‘becoming-a-fan’ narratives as a way to illustrate how the self works in the lives of fans and how a turn towards fan identity helps to refocus a previous emphasis on becoming-a-fan as similar to religious conversion. I argue fans of The Beatles and Cash relate to one or more values embedded in the celebrity and, in combination with socialization to the fan object, transition to a fan identity. Harrington and Bielby’s notion of texistence helps to explain what maintains this identity over the life course. In conclusion, I consider whether this new-found identity reveals an important dynamic about the way people transition to fandom.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".