An in-depth examination of the novel ways young people support and
learn from each other though participation in online fanfiction
communities.
Over the past twenty years, amateur fanfiction writers have published an
astonishing amount of fiction in online repositories. More than 1.5
million enthusiastic fanfiction writers--primarily young people in their
teens and twenties--have contributed nearly seven million stories and
more than 176 million reviews to a single online site, Fanfiction.net.
In this book, Cecilia Aragon and Katie Davis provide an in-depth
examination of fanfiction writers and fanfiction repositories, finding
that these sites are not shallow agglomerations and regurgitations of
pop culture but rather online spaces for sophisticated and informal
learning. Through their participation in online fanfiction communities,
young people find ways to support and learn from one another.
Aragon and Davis term this novel system of interactive advice and
instruction distributed mentoring, and describe its seven attributes,
each of which is supported by an aspect of networked technologies:
aggregation, accretion, acceleration, abundance, availability,
asynchronicity, and affect. Employing an innovative combination of
qualitative and quantitative analyses, they provide an in-depth
ethnography, reporting on a nine-month study of three fanfiction sites,
and offer a quantitative analysis of lexical diversity in the 61.5
billion words on the Fanfiction.net site. Going beyond fandom, Aragon
and Davis consider how distributed mentoring could improve not only
other online learning platforms but also formal writing instruction in
schools.
