Editing Fandom (section)

== Fandom and technology ==
The rise of the Internet created new and powerful outlets for fandom. While the principles of fandom largely remain the same, internet users now have the ability to engage in discourse on a global scale, creating an even stronger sense of community among fans. Mark Duffet touches on this point in ''Popular Music Fandom: Identities, Roles and Practices'': "Online social media platforms... have operated as a forthright challenge to the idea that electronic mediation is an alienating and impersonal process".<ref>{{Cite book |title=Popular music fandom: identities, roles and practices |date=2014 |publisher=Routledge |isbn=978-0-415-50639-7 |editor-last=Duffett |editor-first=Mark |series=Routledge studies in popular music |location=New York}}</ref>

Fandoms engaging with technology began with early engineers trading [[Grateful Dead]] set lists and discussing the setup of the band's concert speaker system, called the "Wall of Sound," on [[ARPANET]], a precursor to the Internet.<ref name="Beauchamp-2017">{{Cite magazine
|author=Scott Beauchamp
|author-link=Scott Beauchamp
|url=https://psmag.com/social-justice/the-internet-is-the-grateful-dead
|title=The Internet Is the Grateful Dead
|magazine=[[Pacific Standard]]
|date=2017-06-14
|access-date=2020-03-05
}}</ref> This led to tape trading over [[File Transfer Protocol|FTP]], and the [[Internet Archive]] began to add [[Grateful Dead]] shows in 1995.<ref name="Beauchamp-2017" /> Online tape trading communities such as [[etree]] evolved into [[Peer-to-peer|P2P]] networks trading shows through [[BitTorrent|torrents]]. After the birth of the [[World Wide Web]], many communities adopted the practices of Deadhead fandom online.