Re-entering Fandom Pages in the Era of New Media Ecosystems: The Case of Turkish Television Series and Its Devoted Viewer Communities’ Relations

Abstract

Given the global prominence of Turkish television series, there is a strong necessity for re- evaluating the constitution of transnational fandom groups in new media ecosystems. Hence, the reasons and motivations of multinational fandom communities are something of a blind spot in fandom studies, especially in the case of devoted fan communities of Turkish television series. Most contemporary studies in fandom literature have mainly focused on television viewers’ experiences in individual countries due to cultural proximity and cultural discount theories rather than the constitution of multinational fandom groups in the new media ecosystem. However, this article argues that such existing research could not adequately explain the transnational cultural flows. Furthermore, said previous studies were not capable of explaining the ongoing interactions of multinational fandom groups and new media ecosystems. Therefore, the aim of this article is twofold: firstly, it investigates how the relationships between fan communities in the new media ecosystems, transnational cultural flows, and new media ecosystems could be established in the case of Turkish television series from the perspectives of a comparative wide-ranging literature review; secondly, it reconsiders mutual relations of fandom groups (N:11000) and new media ecosystems which are mainly based on critical textual analysis and non-participant observations obtained from March 2020 to March 2022. In contrast with most existing studies with this theme, this study argues that the influence of global video on demand platforms on the constitution of online fandom groups is not the necessarily same. The study concludes that the establishment of these groups is mainly based on distinct cultural, economic, political, and social differences in each community. Therefore, the establishment of online fandom groups in Turkey provides some positive contributions for the said groups and video on demand platforms’ dialectics.

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Keywords

celebrity, datafied societies, digitization, online fandom, Turkey