How fangirls built the internet

One Direction stans set the tone for social media as we know it. The Wednesday edition of the Goods newsletter is all about internet culture, brought to you by senior reporter Rebecca Jennings. The Wednesday edition of the Goods newsletter is all about internet culture, brought to you by senior reporter Rebecca Jennings. 😩 What the boy band stans wrought 🙌 You’ve seen the images: grainy black-and-white shots of teenagers, mostly girls, crying, screaming, flailing their arms across blockades as police officers try in vain to hold them back. In photos, they look pained, ecstatic, desperate, devoted. The term that came to describe the phenomenon alluded to the irrationality of it all: Beatlemania. Fifty years later, another British boy band landed in America with a fervor that appeared quite similar: One Direction. In that time, the nature of fandom evolved dramatically thanks to the internet, which enabled people to come together who only shared one thing in common, people to whom it was the most important thing in their lives. Beyond that, though, the fans who populated the internet also played a key role in creating it: the conventions, the language, the mob mindset, the memes. That’s the subject of Kaitlyn Tiffany’s debut nonfiction book, [Everything I Need I Get from You: How Fangirls Created the Internet as We Know It](, which acts as an ethnography of stan culture through the lens of a One Direction superfan. Tiffany (who, disclosure, was previously a reporter at Vox) provides nuanced analysis of an often-overlooked force in internet history, one dominated by the kind of young women whom the rest of the world dismissed as little more than brainless teenyboppers. We recently chatted over the phone about the experience of writing the book, fandom’s fraught relationship with capitalism, and what the act of screaming for your fave can do. “There are no girls on the internet” was a common axiom on 2000s-era message boards, but clearly that is not and was never the case. What were women doing on the early internet, and why were they less visible? There was obviously a gender gap in the early days of the web, but it started closing much earlier than people think. Around 2000 is when researchers started noticing that women, and especially younger women, weren’t using it in the transactional or goal-oriented ways that men were using it for work or promotion, but as a social tool. The internet was a lot more like the telephone, which became a domestic communication tool. With the rise of social media and interaction-based platforms, women were the early adopters, and particularly fans were the early adopters to basically everything that’s been created. Why were Tumblr and Twitter in particular so fruitful for fandoms? People forget about this now, but Tumblr was pretty unprecedented as a visual tool. GIFs that were invented on Tumblr became part of the cornerstone of fandom. It was also a counterpart to public-facing platforms like Facebook, which is not where you’d go to publish your slash fic [fanfiction about same-sex romance] under your real name for your parents and grandparents to see. Tumblr had this very secluded feeling and gave fans a lot of tools that they didn't have on other websites. With Twitter, it’s the opposite. It was this vacant space that fans were among the first to, like, homestead. That was where you would do the public-facing part of fandom, your favorite picture of Rihanna and a link to her song so that people will buy it, and so that she'd become the most famous woman in the world, which is what you want, because you love her. Fans were the first people to really try to game the trending hashtags, kind of like spam networks. They intuitively understood that if we’re all following each other and amplifying each other’s content about Justin Bieber or whatever, we can break the site. The [first chapter, called “Screaming,”]( delves into the almost religious-like ecstasy that fangirls feel toward their idols, and why that feeling is often dismissed as teen hysteria or marketing manipulation. Why haven’t we been able to capture a fuller picture of this extremely common phenomenon? One of the main things that people find embarrassing about fandom in general and about fangirls specifically is that they appear outwardly to have really been duped by the most obvious expressions of capitalism and the shiniest, silliest trinkets presented by the entertainment industry to young, susceptible people. They spend all that money and time to be lulled into this sameness. I don’t want to go too far in the direction of saying that fans are actually resisting capitalism or progressive or revolutionary, because that’s not necessarily true either. But I think being a fan can encourage you to spend your time in ways that are “unproductive.” Even if you are buying the box of One Direction Valentines and falling for the chemically engineered hook, you’re also thinking about, “Why am I happy listening to this? Why do I enjoy being around other people who like listening to this? Why is it so entertaining for me to see these pop stars refracted in these extreme fanfiction scenarios? What does it say about what I'm looking for in my life? What kind of world would I prefer to live in?” There's obviously limits to how useful that is. But I've definitely been at a Harry Styles concert and been like, “Why do I feel so different from the last time I was at a Harry Styles concert?” I think it's good for people to mark times in their lives and think about questions they wouldn't necessarily be thinking about in a daily context. You do such a thorough job of showing how fans are often incredibly self-aware, as opposed to the irrational sheeplike followers they’re often portrayed to be (“One Direction ruined my life," e.g.). Why is it that outside observers can understand the layers of irony used by, say, 4chan posters, but not fangirls’ self-deprecation? Part of it is just misogyny. Screaming girls seem like they couldn’t possibly be funny or smart or self-deprecating about what they're experiencing. It’s also that if you’re a regular user of the internet, the parts of fandom that you’re most likely to be experiencing are not necessarily the good parts. You’re seeing a journalist get mobbed on Twitter, you’re not seeing the memes on Tumblr. There’s a lack of curiosity, which is on the part of a regular person is fine, but there was this really intense urgency to [understand the boys of 4chan]( and the darker parts of the internet around the 2016 election, and that curiosity didn’t extend to the other enormous cultural phenomenon that was shaping the web at the time because it wasn't as scary and bleak. From the time that One Direction started in 2011 to the time they broke up in 2016, mainstream attitudes toward pop culture and pop music became a lot more celebratory. How did it affect the way we talk about fangirls? There was a lot of blogosphere and Twitter discussion of, “You can’t dislike this thing if girls like it because girls are brilliant and the future,” which was sort of complicated to watch. A lot of the people who were saying that were only saying it to get people to buy things. There was a little bit of an overcorrection, where we felt that we were so mean to these girls that now we need to talk about them as if they are saints and geniuses, when really all they ever wanted was to be talked about as though they were people, or to be left alone. There was a cynical turn where it went from “fandom is a pathology” to “fangirls are heroes and everything they do is great.” You’re referring to a group of millions of people: Some of them are going to be great and some of them are going to be scary, and it isn’t useful to generalize in either direction. To draw on some [recent One Direction news,]( what do you think about the Liam Payne interview? I read the quotes and I feel like they weren’t that bad! It was like, “We all used to get on each other’s nerves and Zayn is a bad person but I support him.” He really didn’t say anything that people didn’t already know. Poor Liam. He’s a crypto guy now, and he put four Christmas songs on his debut solo album. He’s just sad. I feel bad for all of them because none of them are anywhere near as great as One Direction. [Learn more about RevenueStripe...](   Clickbait 👀 - A delightful account of [what it’s like to dine out]( with a TikTok food influencer (spoiler: really annoying!). - You can now [receive texts]( from the Jonas Brothers for the low, low price of $4.99 per month. - The artist [whose label won’t let him release]( new music until he creates enough TikTok hype. - Andreessen Horowitz, arguably the most famous VC firm in the world, [might be gaslighting you](. - Meet [Web3’s most visible critic](, Molly White, who runs the blog Web3 Is Going Just Great. - The [thorny question]( of whether PR companies can and should pay influencers to promote causes that they may or may not already believe in.   One Last Thing 👋 Introducing [“naurism,”]( a force equal and opposite to “yassification,” or when straight people co-opt queer cultural phenomena. Current examples: frat bros doing poppers and listening to “Industry Baby,” Pride parades sponsored by Citibank, and straight girls in Carhartt beanies. [Learn more about RevenueStripe...]( Manage your [email preferences]( or [unsubscribe](param=goods). If you value Vox’s unique explanatory journalism, support our work with a one-time or recurring [contribution](. View our [Privacy Policy]( and our [Terms of Service](. Vox Media, 1201 Connecticut Ave. NW, Floor 12, Washington, DC 20036. Copyright © 2022. All rights reserved.