Affective activation, and the community engagement it fosters, is the driving mechanism of all fandoms, irrespective of the specific “objects of affection” around which they coalesce. These centralized objects of affection may hail from popular culture, such as in the form of sports teams, television shows, cartoon characters, or musicians. As fan scholars have increasingly recognized, fandoms can also emerge around profit-driven brands, specific politicians, and social movements. Much has been said regarding the dangers of the online conspiracy theory QAnon. However, these warnings have tended to overemphasize the rapidly evolving, amorphous beliefs of its adherents, rather than recognize the affective activation propelling the movement. Through its analysis of affect-driven communities, the field of fan studies can be productively applied to investigate the online discursive activities of QAnon community members. Framing QAnon as a fandom elucidates the functions through which the conspiracy theory radicalizes “normies” by exploiting the types of fan activities already well-established in mainstream fan communities. Underscoring the transferability of fan studies concepts to political movements and communities, this exploration outlines the societal stakes of QAnon’s manipulation and normalization of the toxic emotions cohering its adherents into a fanatic community.

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What happens when a person engages with a virtual world? Are there unique processes of engagings that occur? One approach to understanding how a person makes sense of a virtual world is to compare the engaging processes with other media technologies, focusing on situated performative and interpretive sense-makings. This article reports on a study conducted to compare how novices make sense of four media technologies: film, console videogames, massively multiplayer online roleplaying games, and social virtual worlds. Using Dervin's Sense-Making Methodology (SMM) and our conceptualization of media reception situations, we extracted five potential overlapping sensemaking concepts to make comparisons that do not presume a priori the influences of characteristics of technologies and other structures. The five comparative concepts all focus on situated sensemaking processes. Our purpose in this article is not to present a full study report but rather to illustrate the methodological approach used in the data collection/production and analysis of the study. Results of our analyses indicate the complexity of media reception situations, how they converged and diverged, and how they involve multiple potential influences on media reception outcomes.

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PURPOSEThe purpose of the study reported here was to continue our efforts to: a) test the empirical advantages of treating the "emotions" associated with information seeking and use (ISU) as multi-dimensional concepts rather than as a conflated amalgam of many concepts; b) conceptualize emotions as attributes ascribed by actors to situations rather than as traits ascribed to actors; and c) compare the predictive power of different predictors of ISU. We pitted two user-defined categorizations of information-seeking situations against each other to predict user reports of source use. The first was how users described situations in material terms --i.e. what kinds of situations they saw themselves as facing in terms of the usual categorizations applied by systems such as everyday life-facing (e.g. housing, health); and, scholarship, research. The second consisted of a series of six situation "emotions" assessments, rating scales that users applied to situations. The core research question focused on understanding when source use was best accounted for by nature of situation and/or by situational "emotions" assessments. POSTER