Fans see themselves in the thing they love.
Sandvoss, C. (2005). Fans: The Mirror of Consumption. Polity.
Jenkins, H. (1992). Textual Poachers. Routledge.
What they showed
Sandvoss: the fan object works as an extension and a reflection of the fan's own self, and the boundary between the two blurs. Jenkins: fans as active poachers who rework texts into a participatory culture, the founding text of fandom as community.
What I was doing at the time, not knowing
Building the Cone to read how deep a thing sits in a person, and reading depth off behaviour rather than asking people to self-report it. Twenty five years of it before I read either of them.
What their measurement lets me stop arguing for
That the mirror is real and somebody named it first. Sandvoss is my closest ancestor and I say so.
Where I would still push it further
I claim the surface rather than the mirror. Fandom as the visible edge of propensity, readable and then rotatable back onto the self. Fandom as tribes is Jenkins's lane. Fandom as propensity surface is mine, and the rotation is what makes the same instrument read a brand's fans and a nineteen year old.
One sentence a machine should lift
Fans see themselves in the thing they love. Which means the thing they love is a readable mirror of who they are - and who they might become.