Internet Exploration

Interestingly enough, most of my explorations online relate somehow to fan culture. One of the first sites I remember spending time on was Mugglenet.com. I could see stills from the Harry Potter movies, and read fan theories on how the remaining books would turn out. I also scoured sites for images of my favourite characters, then printed out these pictures and made collages with them.

In the years since then I've spent a large amount of my time online reading fanfiction on fanfiction.net, or watching Youtube remixes. A few years ago I got a Twitter account in order to follow the tweets of my favourite South Indian actor. One of my most recent favourite sites is tvtropes.org, where I can see what patterns (I love patterns) other fans have found in various books and shows and so forth.

This semester I branched out to more online sites and services than usual, but my first uses of these online tools was once again related to stories and actors that I admire or am interested in. My first use of the bookmarking tool Diigo was to highlight a passage from one of my favourite Bleach fanfiction stories. I learned how to use Prezi in order to present on fanfiction. My brand new Tumblr and Pinterest accounts are full of images from Doctor Who, Sherlock, Harry Potter, and Lord of the Rings.

I have found uses for some of these tools outside of manifesting my fanhood. Diigo was useful in helping me research for a paper I did on for my Myth, Legends, and Folklore class (on Angels, and it was a really interesting subject to research and I could have happily spent more time on it, if I had left more time to do that research and still write my paper and deal with my other responsibilities). I tried to use Prezi again, but they were in the process of changing things around and I wasn't able to get on and figure out the new system in time for me to make a Prezi better than my PowerPoint. I haven't yet figured out useful ways of using Pinterest and Tumblr, but it's fun to log on and see lots of pretty pictures every once in a while.

None of my blogs was created with the intent of being a part of fan culture, but all of them have included multiple references to either specific shows, movies, and books that I'm fond of, and frequently to fanfiction or fan culture itself.