Community Rankings and Affective Discipline: The Case of Fandometrics

Abstract

AbstractTumblr’s Fandometrics is a metrics project that posts weekly fandom rankings for TV shows, movies, music, video games, ‘ships,’ and more. Tumblr describes the rankings as representing “each fandom’s influence across Tumblr.” This influence is determined with a measurement that does not account for sentiment and yet provides prominence and voice to the ‘loudest’ fandoms. Building on work on audience measurement, we argue Fandometrics encourages social jostling by online communities for relevance on the Tumblr platform, and within fandom and wider culture. By equating the strength of communities with their status as influencers or markets, these rankings usher fans towards subjectivities that put data and quantitative rankings at the centre of societal value and inter-community relationships. We argue that as metrics become more visible to users, some communities respond with a kind of affective discipline, at times exaggerating, restraining, cloaking, or reconfiguring positive and negative affect in their online engagement in line with algorithmic requirements for measurement. We identify and discuss the major affective and social implications for the communities ranked by Tumblr’s Fandometrics. Finally, we discuss efforts by some users to resist or withdraw from Fandometrics and/or the communities that value its rankings, and efforts by fans to (re)claim their own data through self-measurement. We argue that with platforms’ increasing concentration of data power, critical data studies must attend to such community-driven alternative models of data and metrics. The fandom metrics phenomenon reflects larger anxieties about value, relevance, and power in increasingly metrified online spaces.