“Stop moaning. I gave you my email. Give me a solution”: Walker Stalker Con, fantagonism and fanagement on social media

Jones, Bethan 2018. “Stop moaning. I gave you my email. Give me a solution”: Walker Stalker Con, fantagonism and fanagement on social media. Participations: Journal of Audience and Reception Studies 15 (1) , pp. 252-271.

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Abstract

Previous articles on social media policing have focused on fans policing other fans (Zubernis and Larsen 2012) or fans policing celebrities (Chin 2015). As Marwick and boyd (2010) note, however, social media has enabled two-way communication between fans and celebrities, and just as fans police the behaviour of celebrities, so can celebrities use social media, and their own fanbase, to police other fans. In this article I examine the ways celebrities use social media as a form of ‘fanagement’ (Hills 2012) and by extension encourage fans to police other fans through an exploration of the relationship between fans and fanboy entrepreneur James Frazier, owner and organiser of The Walking Dead fan convention, Walker Stalker. I focus on the conversations taking place on Twitter around the changes implemented to the ticketing and queuing systems at the 2017 Walker Stalker London convention and the prices charged at the 2018 Walker Stalker London. I suggest that fans’ criticism of Frazier displays Derek Johnson’s concept of fantagonism (2007) but that Frazier’s response functions as a two-fold form of fanagement by both attempting to publically police inappropriate fan behaviour and encouraging other fans to utilise their own policing tactics to keep these adversarial fans in line.

Item Type:	Article
Date Type:	Publication
Status:	Published
Schools:	Schools > Journalism, Media and Culture
Publisher:	Participations
ISSN:	1749-8716
Last Modified:	16 Apr 2025 15:15
URI:	https://orca.cardiff.ac.uk/id/eprint/177557

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