ABSTRACT
Fans are special. Nowadays they appear to be the holy grail of media culture, which makes it hard to believe that they were once its outcasts. In the 1980s, the common idea was that fans were mindless and mass media were maddening. Fans were characterized as extremely devoted followers that had an obsessive attachment to media stars or texts, stressing the fanatical part in the etymology of the word fan. The alleged irrationality of fandom, and incidents like the murder of John Lennon by the hand of a fan in 1980, strengthened the idea that fandom was a pathology and that popular culture was dangerous.
