1. Introduction
[1.1] In April 2014, the four authors of this article conceived the idea of a conference panel focused on the musical comedy-drama television series Glee (Fox, 2009–15) and its cultural and scholarly functions off-screen. We were each already working on particular research projects related to Glee in our own disciplines; through the course of our discussions, we realized they shared a common thread, and perhaps we could present them together. Through a brainstorming process facilitated by a long string of emails and document submissions, we successfully submitted a panel, "'The Show Must Go All Over the Place': Glee and Off-Screen Cultural Transformations," to the Mid-Atlantic Popular and American Culture Association (MAPACA) conference and presented our papers at that panel in November of that year. Our papers varied in topic from the rhetoric of meta writing to the potential for transformative learning to the cultural impact of flash mobs; while coming from varying disciplinary perspectives, all had Glee at their core. The unusual part of this story is not the submission of the panel, or even the panel itself, but how the four of us met. We were (and are) all active on the user-friendly microblogging site Tumblr, a social media platform that many see as a virtual space for teenagers and passionate fans of all stripes. For Glee fans at that time, especially those searching for in-depth meta commentary and community, the fandom primarily "lived" in blogs hosted on LiveJournal and WordPress. Around 2011–12, it seemed as if the fandom (including us four) suddenly gravitated toward Tumblr. This essay captures Tumblr's impact on our approaches to professional and scholarly work, as well as the ways the site became a support system for us academics, who might not otherwise have crossed each other's disciplinary paths. It examines the ways in which Tumblr's unique platform and tools facilitate social scholarship and extended conversations, as well as the implications for academia's evolving relationship with mainstream social media.
[1.2] The Tumblr Glee community was generally receptive to diverse perspectives, supportive of all kinds of fans, and by and large devoid of the shipping wars that so often divide other fandoms. In addition, unlike other popular fandoms in which fans would create their own slash pairings or accept the crumbs of fan service teased by showrunners, Glee had canon LGBTQ+ representation, with its own relationships, romantic milestones, and character development. The show tended to attract people who not only loved music and musical theater, but also those who were invested in analysis and close textual and visual reading. Tumblr was a particularly good platform for facilitating a musical fandom for several reasons: it allowed for easy posting of videos, audio files, and GIF sets; those files could be quickly accessed and commented on by other bloggers; and all of the multimedia elements allowed for numerous layers of meta-analysis. We often depended on fandom GIF set makers who would post their creations during or immediately after an episode, allowing us to reblog and write meta commentary instantaneously. As our individual networks within the Glee fandom expanded, we found each other thanks to high-traffic bloggers reposting our commentary, which typically involved analyzing the show's musical numbers, wardrobe choices, accessories, and props. While the four of us found each other on Tumblr and became friends over our mutual love of a pop culture phenomenon, as academics we soon took advantage of Tumblr as a means of professional networking and CV building.
[1.3] Tumblr as yet remains understudied as a platform for the specific ways it facilitates scholarly research, even within fan studies. Traditional academic networking usually involves considerable time and expense. To meet other scholars with common interests, one frequently has to take days off and apply for funding to go to professional conferences. While conferences can be beneficial for making professional contacts, it can be difficult to find other people there who share one's specific interests, particularly at large events that might involve thousands of scholars. Tumblr, on the other hand, makes both networking and scholarly research of fandom easier in a number of ways that differ from both scholarly networking sites and previous fan-oriented platforms. First, by using hashtags and blogs that attempt to create communities around particular fandoms, Tumblr makes it simpler to find other fans, scholars, or acafans who share one's interests. Scholarly exchange and conversation can flow freely on Tumblr in a way that may otherwise be suppressed by journal and database paywalls and expensive conferences. Second, researching popular culture in general is made easier because so much of Tumblr is dedicated to popular culture itself. Musical fandoms like Glee are particularly multimedia-rich cultures, and unlike LiveJournal or WordPress, Tumblr's simple interface makes both posting of and responding to fandom content easy and immediate, without needing in-depth knowledge of coding. Instead of trying to collect data and examples from individual acquaintances or through electronic mailing lists, Tumblr's unbounded nature makes it possible to address and interact with a large fandom collective, a sample size that is much broader and much more representative. Third, because Tumblr allows popular culture scholars to communicate with each other on a regular basis, it becomes a platform for mutual support and encouragement of scholarly projects and writing.
2. Tumblr as networking tool
[2.1] Had the four of us utilized traditional academic networking methods, it's likely we never would have met, as none of us share the same academic discipline: we work in English and popular culture, composition, library and information studies, and adult education and instructional design. Glee happened to draw our interests together, with its intertextual mining of popular culture and music, film, musical theater, and literature. However, it was Tumblr that pulled us into actual conversation and community. Through talking, writing, and exchanging ideas about Glee in the fannish space of Tumblr, the professional pressures of academia were taken away. Originally, we were there as fans more than academics, discussing a piece of popular culture in our off time. We weren't worried about being completely professional, writing formally, or supporting every assertion we made with irrefutable evidence. Our joyful, excited, in-the-moment exchanges allowed us to be creative and impulsive with our analysis. In fact, this gap between a scholar's use of evidence and fandom's—in the context of making an argument—sparked the panel topic for the compositionist among us (Bundy 2014).
[2.2] Granted, within a large fandom like Glee's, the "community" meant our own little fandom pocket, but it was one with a seemingly high ratio of mature, educated fans, many of whom had prior experiences in other fandoms and on other platforms. That said, with Tumblr, one cannot even really say we occupied a bounded "community." Unlike LiveJournal or a discussion board that has a virtual home base, a fan's experience of any fandom on Tumblr is porous, and largely determined by their dashboard, what blogs or tags they choose to follow (or block), and what content they choose to reblog and share. Tumblr's openness helped facilitate our finding each other and our learning about the variety of fan practices, which would provide the basis for our research. Not all of our interactions, however, happened in Tumblr's public spaces. Taking part in conversations through reblogs (which then appeared on followers' dashboards) was certainly one means of building relationships among us, but we engaged in more traditional networking as well, which Tumblr also facilitated through its private messaging feature. Through messaging, one blogger might share specifics about their research interests or upcoming presentations, or might offer up private insights in regard to a question submitted to their public ask box. In our case, one of us posted that she was attending a regional conference of the Popular Culture Association/American Culture Association (PCA/ACA); her Tumblr message box soon contained questions, encouragements and invitations to meet.
[2.3] Our migrating toward Tumblr—and each other—is an example of higher education's gradual move toward social scholarship, an "integration of the internet and social media into scholars' contemporary work" (Greenhow and Gleason 2014, 392). While online social media platforms designed just for researchers, such as ResearchGate or Mendeley, offer opportunities for networking and collaboration, they have a large learning curve and, as a result, make community building more challenging than mainstream social media platforms. They're also less pleasurable. Among mainstream social media tools, Tumblr's features create and engage its microcommunities in unique ways that facilitate fannish investments and dialogue. Because it is primarily a microblogging platform—and allows for user-friendly image, GIF, video, audio, and text posts—there is room to curate, share, squee, and have conversation in a way that's easier to follow than Facebook, allows for more depth than Twitter, and is overall more encompassing of musical fandom content. This aspect of Tumblr was especially useful for one of the authors, a librarian who had written on library flash raves in the past; her paper focused on the role viral flash mob culture played in the acceptance of musical performances on scripted television. She was able to crowdsource Glee performances, YouTube videos of flash mobs, and GIF sets of both from Tumblr fandom (Downey 2016). Furthermore, the Tumblr interface allows users to reblog a post and add commentary, so each reblog in effect carries a contextualized conversation. The layered conversations and the record of exchanges Tumblr posts capture so well—often a mishmash of pithy remarks, sarcasm, astute commentary, observation, and sometimes outside sources—become objects of value within the fandom's gift economy (figure 1). As Tisha Turk points out, the consumption and usage of fandom gifts by other fans is just as important as their creation: "We see the value of fan labor…in fans' consumption of the gifts produced and distributed by fellow fans…fans make these things for other fans to use. Use is therefore the clearest sign of a gift accepted" (2014, ¶4.1). Such work forges new relationships—in our case, across multiple disciplines, across very different types of institutions, and across many state lines.
Figure 1. A conversation about the hidden and overt meanings of a costume accessory worn by Tina Cohen-Chang on Glee episode 4.10 "Naked."
3. Tumblr as research tool
[3.1] Tumblr's tagging, reblogging, and note archiving qualities also make the site a rich source for extracting data and content from a broad representative sample to use in popular culture research. The tagging feature, in particular, enables users to discover new and expanded content about their own fandoms, whether they be fan fiction, fan art, meta-analysis, or canon and spoilers. In her conference paper, the adult learning scholar of our group discussed how Glee was used as a form of public pedagogy for transformative learning experiences in fandom by exploring the already-existing Tumblr tags "transformational power of glee" and "transformative power of glee" as examples of how fans shared personal learning experiences from Glee (Shih 2014). It is also possible to create a Tumblr tag in order to track a conversation, or a series of them. One Tumblr user, nadiacreek, created a "Glee meta fest" tag to keep track of people's responses to a daily meta prompt (nadiacreek 2013). The practice of reblogging and tagging fellow Tumblr users and their content in these meta conversations can be compared to the traditional mode of citation in academic research; we cite not only because it is essential to retain integrity, but also because it brings fellow authors into the "scholarly conversation." When Tumblr fans reblog and add commentary, they are very much practicing a similar type of citation. The literature scholar of our group discussed the practice of meta writing in her conference paper, and the ways that meta-analysis of Glee was a communal practice in which bloggers built on one another's ideas. Meta posts are often long and complex, and they draw on common cultural reference points like mythology, astrology, religion, and others (Hamilton-Honey 2014). Reblogging a user's meta post and adding new material (and then repeating that process) essentially creates a direct line of citations and references via an ongoing conversation.
[3.2] Tumblr has its drawbacks for scholars, some of which have long existed for the acafan. For example, you can have a rapport with a fellow member of fandom anonymously, even consider them a colleague, but to properly collaborate, eventually you have to cross the thin blue line of Tumblr into real life. Some fans are completely open about their real-life scholarship online and publicly; others prefer to keep those areas separate on either end. The administrative culture at their particular institution may not be supportive of fandom activities or fan-related research, and their fan community online may be suspicious of scholarly exploitation. Fortunately, neither of these situations caused a problem for us. Within the Glee Tumblr community, for instance, there was not much of a reaction to the four authors self-identifying as academics. If anything, our self-disclosures drew empathy from fellow Glee fans with similar academic experiences or backgrounds. That said, we all managed our identities in different ways. None of us used our real names in our usernames or identified our higher education institutions on Tumblr, yet all of us identified ourselves as academics on our individual Tumblr blogs. We thus retained a degree of professional anonymity while still identifying ourselves as academics, and considered our Tumblr identities to most resemble what Kimmons and Veletsianos (2014, 295) have called an "acceptable identity fragment." In their research, Kimmons and Veletsianos found that individuals reveal fragments of themselves online, and while each fragment may be authentic, it is also incomplete, transitional, and developed intentionally. This formulation seems to us a useful method for thinking about fan participation on Tumblr more generally and reflects the way we performed ourselves on that platform.
[3.3] We found that the other two major difficulties with doing fan research with Tumblr were verifying sources and their ephemerality. It can be difficult to ascertain or verify original authorship on Tumblr; just as fan fiction has plagiarism accusations, so can meta-analysis and theory. The impermanence of Tumblr as a platform is also a disadvantage. Users change their usernames (making posts under their former name harder to find), delete posts that they no longer like or find useful, or delete their entire accounts. In addition, old Tumblr posts are not cached in Google or by services such as the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine, making retrieval of deleted content nearly impossible. The result of this constant shifting of content and URLs is that parts of meta conversations can become unreadable. Using a "Read More" link can reduce clutter on the dashboard, but if the link creator changes their username or deletes their blog, that link leads nowhere. Without clues to new Tumblr identities, conversations can be lost. Solutions to these obstacles usually fall on the original poster, such as including a redirect to the new user name (so one can copy and paste it into the original post's URL; figure 2), or meta sites having a tag, submit, and reblog policy (figure 3). Failing that, an experienced acafan simply learns to take a screenshot content for future use.
Figure 2. Example of a comment linked to a broken URL; the writer changed his or her username, making full posts harder to find.
Figure 3. Some posting guidelines for Tumblr site "Fuck Yeah Glee Meta!" (http://fyeahgleemeta.tumblr.com/).
4. Tumblr as scholarly support system
[4.1] One of the most beneficial aspects of basing our communication for the conference panel on Tumblr was that we could easily message each other, and share links very quickly and efficiently. Rather than going back and forth between email programs and Tumblr on our computers (or trying to toggle between apps on our phones) and composing a full message to the group, we could simply post a link or a reference and tag the usernames of the others in the group. In addition, we could exchange private messages in real time while we were writing; if any two or more of us were online at the same time, we could encourage each other through the process of writing our individual papers. Another alternative was to write a text post, tag the others in the group, and then reblog the post and add commentary and responses (figure 4). If we were searching for a particular meta essay to use, we could put out a general call to our Glee community and access their collective memory for examples (figure 5). Rather than pursuing our individual panel papers in isolation, Tumblr allowed us to trade ideas and sources as we wrote. We were better able to reference each other's theses, thus making our panel more coherent as a whole, because Tumblr provided us with a rapid way in which to do so.
Figure 4. Reblog Tumblr thread discussing Blaine Anderson's frequent wearing of red clothing and accessories.
Figure 5. "Call for content" post searching for meta regarding the "Bushwick Loft" set on Glee.
[4.2 This is a profoundly different model than traditional panel-building for academic conferences. At many conferences, conference organizers choose papers that have similar interests and put them together, but the presenters may have no communication beforehand and not actually meet each other until the day of their presentations; even pre-organized panelists usually do not read each other's papers before presenting them. However, Tumblr's networking space allowed the four of us to collaborate more efficiently, quickly, closely, and thoroughly than we would have otherwise done. Even in the last-minute scramble to get everything done before the conference (figure 6), we were able to create a Tumblr post that allowed us all to express our worries and give each other much-needed support. This kind of supportive collaboration is characteristic of the gift culture of fandom and participatory culture as it exists for us on Tumblr. It allowed us to nurture our own fannish behavior while at the same time creating a presentation that was going to bring us professional academic advancement. Our academic practices have migrated with us to other fandoms as well; the objects of fan affection have changed, but the need to analyze, critique, and create meta conversations has not, and those of us who happen to meet again in similar fandoms get to apply the skills developed and enhanced by our experience.
Figure 6. Our panel members reassure and encourage each other in the last-minute rush toward the conference and presentation day.
5. Conclusion
[5.1] Henry Jenkins (2006) suggests that convergence culture is a paradigm shift, "a move from medium-specific content toward content that flows across multiple media channels, toward the increased interdependence of communication systems, toward multiple ways of accessing media content, and toward ever more complex relations between top-down corporate media and bottom-up participatory culture" (254). Our experience on Tumblr suggests that convergence culture is also pushing academia to move across platforms and rethink its relationship to bottom-up participatory culture. If fandom and participatory culture allow for more spontaneity, creativity, and supportive networking (and academic forms of analysis reach greater audiences through platforms like Tumblr) then perhaps academia needs to rethink its own paradigms for audience engagement and professional development.
6. References
Bundy, Sheryl. 2014. "Writing Essays Just for Fun: Glee Fandom, Meta Composition, and Community." Paper presented at the Mid-Atlantic Popular and American Culture Association Conference, Baltimore, MD, November 6–8, 2014.
Downey, Elizabeth M. 2016. "Glee, Flash Mobs, and the Creation of Heightened Realities." Journal of Popular Film and Television 44 (3): 128–38. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/01956051.2016.1142419.
Greenhow, Christine, and Benjamin Gleason. 2014. "Social Scholarship: Reconsidering Scholarly Practices in the Age of Social Media." British Journal of Educational Technology 45 (3): 392–402.
Hamilton-Honey, Emily. 2014. "All the Colors of the Rainbow: Writing Meta on Characters, Colors, Costumes, and Accessories in Glee." Paper presented at the Mid-Atlantic Popular and American Culture Association Conference, Baltimore, MD, November 6–8, 2014.
Jenkins, Henry. 2006. Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide. New York: New York University Press.
Kimmons, Royce, and George Veletsianos. 2014. "The Fragmented Educator 2.0: Social Networking Sites, Acceptable Identity Fragments, and the Identity Constellation." Computers and Education 72, 292–301. http://doi.org/10.1016/j.compedu.2013.12.001.
Nadiacreek. 2013. "Admin Note." Tumblr post, October 30, 2013. http://nadiacreek.tumblr.com/post/65522306042/admin-note.
Shih, Connie K. 2014. "The Power of Glee: The Potential of Transformative Learning in Fandom." Paper presented at the Mid-Atlantic Popular and American Culture Association Conference, Baltimore, MD, November 6–8, 2014.
Turk, Tisha. 2014. "Fan Work: Labor, Worth, and Participation in Fandom's Gift Economy." In "Fandom and/as Labor," edited by Mel Stanfill and Megan Condis, special issue, Transformative Works and Cultures, no. 15. http://dx.doi.org/10.3983/twc.2014.0518.