How Fangirls Created the Internet As We Know It
Book Club #4: Everything I Need I Get From You
Hi close friends,
It’s been a minute! I’m excited to be back and chatting books and Culture™ with you all again. As I re-acquaint myself with my own newsletter, let me know if there’s anything you would like me to cover. As for today, I have some rambling thoughts on our fourth book club pick for you. Some might even call it a review…
At the beginning of Everything I Need I Get From You, Kaitlyn Tiffany writes:
“This is not actually a book about One Direction, for a couple of reasons: I don’t think they’d appreciate it, and, as much as I love them, they are not so interesting. (They are boys, and we are the same age.) It’s not a book about Twitter or Tumblr or the hundreds of years of technological innovation that brought us to free GIF-making software either. What I would like it to be is a book that explains why I and millions of others needed something like One Direction as badly as we did, and how the things we did in response to that need changed the online world for just about everybody who spends their time in it.” (22)
When I first read this quote, I mistook it to mean One Direction would be but one of many other case studies of fandom and fangirls on the internet the author would dissect. While Tiffany certainly does reference other important subcultures on the internet (Kpop, 4chan, etc.) to provide greater context of fandom’s role in our culture, I quickly realized One Direction wasn’t going anywhere.
Not the boys themselves, but rather Directioners — fans of One Direction — are the lens that the book interrogates fandom from, the author sprinkling in anecdotes both of herself as a fan of the boys for a large portion of her life and as a researcher, revisiting and investigating this desire while writing this book. What I first was a bit turned off by (thinking that I didn’t have quite the depth of love for this band needed to appreciate the references), turned into morbid fascination the deeper Tiffany went into the fandom’s lore. From the crusade and complicated identity politics of the Larries1 — shippers of Harry Styles and Louis Tomlinson — to the infamous “imagine” meme of “Niall Horan crawling in your ear,” this book filled in the gaps of an era of the internet I too once consumed with the hunger of a teenage girl.
One of my favorite ways Tiffany breaks down this mythology is in her definitions of fandom slang. Her scathing description of a “local” in particular still cracks me up every time I re-read it (in recognition of the fact that to some sectors of the internet, I am but a mere aging local myself 😔):
“This is one of the more casually devastating labels one can acquire in the digital age. A local is a person who belongs to no subculture, understands no intricacies of online humor, follows only the accounts of people they know in real life—and maybe The New York Times?—and retweets only the most generic content. Most simply, and most often, a local is a non-stan…Locals have no identity, no allegiances, no personality, no charisma, no passions, no curiosity, and no reason to be on the internet at all. A local joins Twitter to share professional news, which they refer to as “personal news,” and to retweet “inspiring” human interest stories. They love “relatable” content and memes that are long past relevant, and they’re also, it’s implied, kind of lazy. A local is a person who has not been bothered. They haven’t felt moved to do the work of stanning.” (95)
I wasn’t surprised to learn that while women were not as visible or welcomed into internet spaces in their early iterations, they soon began to outpace their male counterparts in enthusiasm, numbers, and in the ways they were constructing new styles and methods of communication and community-building through social media. What I was more intrigued by was the archetype of a fangirl herself, a complicated fallen angel figure, simultaneously a rebel and capitalist product:
“Yet a fangirl still exists in contradiction to the dominant culture. She’s not considered normal or sane; her refusal to accept things the way they are is one of her defining characteristics. She is dropping out of the mainstream even while she embraces a thing that is as mainstream as a thing can get. Publicly, the fangirl wastes money and refuses to make her time useful. With the advent of social media, she started publishing thousands of messages to idols who would never read them.” (9)
Tiffany talks about this idea of “bedroom culture,” that while set up around commercial products and acts, was low risk, low surveillance, and could happen anywhere giving these young girls a sense of freedom they normally couldn’t find in other parts of their lives that existed within rules and constraints. While reading, I loved the seriousness to which scholars took these fangirls: “Girls were ‘problematizing the conventional construction of the bedroom as private,’ Kearney wrote, ‘by using this space not only as a production studio, but also a distribution center.’” (251)
And yet within the same page, I could just as equally be overcome with dread by the author’s own observations of the modern state of the fangirl, “The latest innovation of bedroom culture is to be fourteen, sitting in your room, making an Instagram account dedicated to cataloguing the clothes that another girl wore while she was dancing on TikTok, also in her room. The whole web is created in a girl’s image now.” (251)
The whiplash was fitting. The fangirl cannot be put in a box! She is at times driving the culture, amassing creative output and “democratizing cultural memory”, and even activating large swaths of the population for greater political means. She is forging a means to find her own identity. And in the same breath, the fangirl can be decontextualized and embarrassing, exposing parasocial relationships and crossed boundaries which result in dangerous real-world consequences for the idols she serves. She can be “trash.”2 She can even be captured as a data set, optimized for further commercial ends. As Tiffany puts it, “Fandom is an interruption; it’s as simple as enjoying something for no reason, and it’s as complicated as growing up.” (270)
It’s this “interruption” that rang the most authentic to my personal experience of fandom. At one point, Tiffany investigates the “screaming fangirl” as a permutation of the fangirl, and the way in which “The experience of bodily joy is an invitation to reconsider the conditions that hold you away from it most of the time. Screaming at pop music is not direct action, and screaming does not make a person a revolutionary, but what screaming can and does do is punctuate prolonged periods of silence.” (37) It reminded me of college during finals season, when I’d hear from the library or my dorm window, a horde of students gathered at a designated place to scream, relinquishing all their responsibilities, anxieties, and stress for that moment of time.
When I am not screaming at a concert, my “interruption” is when I get lost in a show or book and participate in the world of material and community built around it — reddit threads, essays, podcasts, live events — and feel a bit lighter about my existence in the world. I am able to be both deeply self-aware of and escape my earthly identity. “We knew that our lives would not be fantasies, except for the fact that they were right now. When we shrieked, it was at the knowledge that the moment would end.” (48)
Inquisitive, reflective, wry, and easily digestible, Everything I Need I Get From You captures a part of the zeitgeist that has informed the way we operate on the internet today. If you’re looking for a 2000-2010s nostalgia trip, interested in social media and fandom culture, or a Directioner yourself, this is the book for you. I’d almost classify it as an academic beach read in the best way. Not life-changing, but definitely informative and entertaining. And I’m excited to keep reading more from Kaitlyn Tiffany at The Atlantic.
As always, if you read along, I would love to hear your thoughts in the comments! I haven’t decided what our next book club pick will be yet either, so I welcome any and all recommendations.
Until next time!
I did sympathize with them to the extent that I myself had briefly fallen down a Gaylor (a portmanteau of "gay" and "Taylor Swift") rabbithole during the pandemic. Let me tell you firsthand, those close readers are convincing!
“To be One Direction trash is to be the type of fan who is devoted beyond the stereotype of asking Mom to buy a lunch box with Zayn Malik’s face on it, or to put up the extra cash for VIP tickets at some arena sponsored by a car company. Trash is gross. One Direction trash make weird jokes tinged with sex and violence, and though they recognize the fact that they’ve been seduced by a commercial product, they don’t care, nor do they respect its sanctity. They belong to a collective—a landfill of trash, a world of trash, heaping with loyalists to the biggest boy band in history. One Direction ruined their lives.” (129)
Close Friends Only morning! I read this late last year and had a parallel experience to you: I thought it would encompass additional fandoms after the Directioners, but after that initial disappointment, stayed for the niche lore and glimmers of the wider internet I (we) were a part of that the Directioners influenced. Always screaming from the rooftops that Y/N by Esther Yi is a perfect delusional fiction companion to the nonfiction exploration as a rendition of falling into obsessive (K-pop) fandom