The act of idolizing has long surpassed just hanging some posters on your bedroom wall. With the rise of the internet, and especially Web 2.0, fandom has extended onto our screens—allowing fans from all over the world to always be in touch with each other.

When, during the Black Lives Matter protests last year, the Dallas police called on people via Twitter to send videos of protesters committing “illegal activities” to their app, K-pop fans spammed the app with concert videos. This avalanche of videos not only made it difficult for the police to filter meaningful information, it also caused the police app to crash within a few hours.

We often talk about the power of social media platforms, such as Facebook. Online fans or stans, named after Eminem’s song from 2000, show that the power of users should not be underestimated. Online tactics rapidly develop within stan communities and are later mimicked or catered to by institutions, companies, and other organisations. Think about Kamala Harris’s “KHive”, inspired by Beyoncé’s BeyHive, or how the Marvel strategically places hints in movie trailers for their fans.

At the same time, social media platforms have turned being a fan into something that is not just about joy and community. In his article “How pop music fandom became sports, politics, religion and all out war,” writer Joe Coscarelli describes pop fandom in 2020 as: ‘Competitive, arcane, sales obsessed, adversarial, amusing and a little frightening.’ On stan Twitter, possibly one of the most toxic places on the internet, stans are always working to hit their competitors with the nastiest clapbacks defending their faves, and stream statistics are compared as if it was a sports competition. This rivalry between stans is fed by mainstream platforms where everyone publicly comes together and where attention is a commodity.

Tonight, we’ll explore how stans organise and to what extent stan culture shapes our online culture. What makes stans so powerful? And what role do stan armies play in social media activism? Together with our guest programmer and researcher for this event, Sjef van Beers, we’ve invited three speakers and three stans with whom we’ll explore these questions. Below you can read more about each speaker. Meet the Rihanna, BTS and ex-Miley Cyrus stan we’ve invited via these video interviews.

The Hmm ON …

We’re using face filters to make ourselves prettier, track our daily steps on our iPhones, and rely on Google Maps to find our destination. But what exactly is the impact of these technologies? With The Hmm ON …, hosted by Felix Meritis in Amsterdam, we reflect on these playful, serious, and sometimes disturbing developments in internet culture.

The series is kindly supported by the Creative Industries fund and Amsterdam Fund for the Arts.

Hybrid event experiment:

This fall we actively experiment with a series of hybrid events as we delve even deeper into the internet cultures that shape, complicate, and transform our lives—further blurring the boundaries between the ‘online’ and ‘offline’ worlds. During this second hybrid experiment we’ll explore the power of the chat. ヽ(o＾▽＾o)ノ