Online Fan Clubs: Group mechanics, emotional addiction, and separation anxiety

Online Fan Clubs: Group mechanics, emotional addiction, and separation anxiety
Kathleen Johnson 10/14/03

Online communication strips emotional cues from conversation: tone of voice, facial expressions, and body language amongst others. This creates anonymity which hastens intimacy. People become bonded in mailing lists. The regular contact creates a sense of a relationship. Real time chats increase the rate of information exchange and the software architecture allows for transposing the event into a book form to be read and digested at a later time.

The virtual neighborhood
Virtual contact promotes support, encouragement, and sharing thus overcomes isolation. The Group becomes the neighborhood, a community, the coffee shop, the Saturday night drag down main street to “see and be seen“. In groups at first there is the honeymoon period where all is wine and roses, then comes the disenchantment period where the boundaries are tested, and finally there is cohesiveness. Early provocateurs challenge the group leader and then depart to form, sometimes, hostile communities that thrive on “fight and flight”.

The Fan Club
These “fan clubs” are the newly identified school yard gangs that are operated by, primarily, cyber bullies. These “fan club” members had prior been emotionally addicted to the Group they have exited from (exit is either voluntarily or involuntarily). Their detrimental emotional dependence on the Group had been brought on by loneliness, lack of emotional support in their personal lives, lack of self esteem because of lack of socially productive activities. In real life boys tend to use their “fists” to resolve arguments, and girls tend to use “friendship“. This trend follows into the Group setting online. You will find that the males tend to “flame” but remain static on the boards, and the females tend to use flight into cliques on other boards from where they use “friendship” as a weapon by exclusion and flame from a distance. It is a fascinating phenomenon. When these two types of Group member become hostile they often use language as a weapon rather than to explore ideas. Flaming results from inadequate empathy for other individuals. The solution to flaming is complex but, industry wide, the only real known solution is strong group guides, moderators, and structure.

The anxiety in separation
Once it is determined that the members behavior within the group confines has become detrimental to the Group, and all other avenues have not worked, then the only solution is to remove the member by banning. Then a more interesting phenomenon develops. The banned member, or members then develop a type of severe anxiety separation disorder. They use any means available to re-join the former Group. This can be in the form of volumes of email to the moderators personal email box, the solicitation of continuing members for empathy thru an email campaign, a campaign via Instant Messenger, and sometimes, in the more overt cases, the formation of an online group from which to launch an “attack”.

The attack can either be in the form of flaming, plans to ostracize of the perceived perpetrator, or repeated vain attempts to circumnavigate the blocked board via spawned ISP addresses or newly created identities. Why is it that members, who had previously expressed sincere displeasure with a Group, would go to such extremes to re-join the group they were previously flaming? This type of separation anxiety is common. Reality is that there are millions of groups out there for these individuals to join. The only one they are seriously concerned about is the one they were just removed/banned from. This separation anxiety can be brief, or can escalate to years of hostility in the online environment.

These “fan” clubs are quite common. Since most violate the Terms of Service for ISP’s as being primarily “hate groups” they, in short order, find the website removed by the ISP. But, of course, then the group just moves onward and forward to other campsites on the internet sometimes as a group, sometimes as individuals.

Conclusion
Each Group and group member emerges from a cocoon, both different in acquired skills exiting than they entered. The process of initiative and creativity only determines a starting point. Learned life skills determine the balance. The Fan Club is one outcome. There is a more positive one but those involved in this activity rarely grow to solve interpersonal problems as they do not recognize or understand the dynamics that lead them down this path.

Kathleen Johnson