In English speaking countries, research on active audiences and fans has been flourishing since the late 1990s. Reception of television messages and contents for fans is not limited to the very moment the show is broadcast on TV; it goes beyond this thanks to several activities that fans express and practice within a virtual community: writing fan-fictions and cultural reviews, creating fan-arts, videos, websites, finding other fans to talk to and share their passion with (Bielby, Harrington, & Bielby, 1999; Jenkins, 2006). Fans belong usually to a virtual community in which the same passion, the same language, the same media practices and the same will to participate are expressed. This sense of belonging is extremely strong among fans (Costello, 2007). This is what the Internet has brought to fans: a virtual place where they can meet up rapidly and easily with no time or space problems. The Internet provides immediacy, even a sense of urgency, for viewers who go online, creating something that is familiar – fandom. According to Henry Jenkins, fans are active receptors, who use new technologies to adapt to new socio-cultural environments to create and redefine a language, practices, identities and values. The cultural logic of the fans blurs the border between consumption and production, between writing and reading. Finally, virtual communities are places of social interactions where there is participation in a mediated environment.
Following Jenkins’s canonical works (1992; 2006), fandoms and fan activities are being discussed in the French academic world and more largely in the English-speaking world as active and creative audiences who use new technologies to perform activities and gather in a “community of practices” (Baym, 1999). In France, young scholars analyze fandoms from a specific activity, such as the creation of fan fictions (François, 2009) or offer a typology of fan activities (Bourdaa, 2014). They also envision fans as a virtual community empowered by their use of new technologies (Martin, 2010; Peyron, 2013). Other scholars study a particular object, TV shows, in order to understand a shift in the reception practices and highlight specific patterns in fan reception (Combes, 2010; Bourdaa, 2012).
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