creator Rao, Xi advisor Hemphill, Libby This paper explores how TV fans use social media. By revtewmg academic perspectives on fandom ofTV shows and social media in past several decades, this paper discusses the way that audiences react to TV shows using the affordance of social media. At the begirming, this article traces the image, activities, and meaning of fandom. Fans were portrayed as deviant creatures until the late 80s. This image was clarified when people looked into fans and their creative works. Scholars realized that fans productively generated creative products based on the given materials, which reflected the social experience of the creators. Therefore, fandom was soon understood as a way of fans to resist the dominant culture in the society. Later on, social media offer fans an immediate, widespread platform to contribute to the TV conversation. With this platform, normal fans show up. Different from productive fandom, median fans are less active in making new meanings of the TV program. Interestingly, a large number of TV audiences are using social media during the broadcast, participating in the discussion of shows. This evidences the convergence of the traditional media, TV, and the new media, social media. It is also found that comments of TV viewers on social media in turn, influence the content of the TV show. Rather than merely spectators, fans are a part of the TV production. As a special case, gender is discussed from the perspective of fandom. Female composers dominant the fan-writing world. Study the producers and products of fan fiction may provide valuable insights into gender dilemmas in the real world. At the end of this essay, 1 summarize how social media atTect the participation of TV fans and discuss remaining questions worthy of future research. Since fandom becomes ubiquitous in the social media age, it is possible to explore fandom as a way to better understand our daily life. Submitted by Erma Thomas (thomase@iit.edu) on 2015-09-03T22:06:58Z No. of bitstreams: 1 Xi Rao-Thesis-2015May.pdf: 4909073 bytes, checksum: 2973b180f4072f811e839591a1b8038b (MD5) Made available in DSpace on 2015-09-03T22:06:58Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 Xi Rao-Thesis-2015May.pdf: 4909073 bytes, checksum: 2973b180f4072f811e839591a1b8038b (MD5) Previous issue date: 2015-05 M.S. in Information Architecture, May 2015 2015 2015-05 http://hdl.handle.net/10560/3534 en Thesis born digital application/pdf In Copyright http://rightsstatements.org/page/InC/1.0/ Restricted Access HUM / Humanities Illinois Institute of Technology Affiliated department