Participant Observations 10/12/17 - Fan Studies Network Conference

The Fan Studies Conference in Wollongong was a really interesting and reward experience. Some takeaways:

• I felt that the paper presentation went well. I tried to get it to follow a logical progression, and integrate the key concepts of the Produser and the Informal Media Economy clearly.
• Because Fan Studies is not an area that I'm too familiar with, it forced me to explain some concepts that I probably take for granted, such as what OTT and anti-siphoning is, which is I think a good grounding experience.
• Rehearsing for presentations is always helpful. It forced me to really tighten up the literature review, and it allowed me to get my presentation down to 20 minutes, almost exactly.
• Rehearsing also made me change the order of the material so that it made the logic easier to follow. After the intro and literature review, I looked at regulation, which led into the AFL Case study, and the outcomes of Illegal vs Legal consumption, then the introduction of key concepts, which then led to a look at AFL Produser consumption practices, and finally some conclusions.
• The conference also made me restate why an Interdisciplinary approach to study is important - most people had little to no consideration of industry at the conference, and I felt that a real strength of my presentation was that it did involve direct data from an industry source.
• I think the presentation was well accepted. There was some good comments posted on social media, and most of the comments seemed to stem from Smith's observation that sports fans experience the same neurological patterns as those people that are undergoing a deep religious experience. This shouldn't be too surprising I guess.

But otherwise the conference was ok. It was only small with probably 30-40 delegates there, but was well run.

It was also probably a bit like going to ComicCon! most of the presentations focus on particular fan communities, especially around TV shows or Films and so on. But it was compelling nonetheless. 

The two keynotes were also helpful I think in terms of understanding new ways to look at Fandom, that moves away from a high culture-low culture binary to more of a quadrant pattern. I'm not sure if this could be applied to sports fandom and AFL fandom, but it might be something worth considering.

And met some interesting people as well, which is always nice!

Now, I need to see if I can get the paper written up and published somewhere!