The indulgence of passionate intensity is one of digital culture’s defining features. Where once fellow enthusiasts, nitpickers, and aficionados tended to be divided by geography and united only via specialist magazines, associations and conventions, nobody today is more than a search term away from finding fellow travelers for even the most obscure obsessions.
It’s a trend that has been reflected in the vocabulary of fandom. Fan itself—in the sense of an enthusiast or follower—is a relatively young word, and the product of the late nineteenth century’s potent combination of organized sports with mass print media. First used in the 1880s and 1890s to describe Americans devoted to following baseball, it probably emerged as a shortened form of the word fanatic, although it may also be related to the earlier habit of describing aficionados of a sport as having a “fancy.”
More significant for our purposes, however, is a story told by—among others—Harry McCracken of the Technologizer blog, describing the appearance in 1973 of a home-made fanzine (a word coined in the late 1940s by combining fan and magazine) at a comic books convention in Chicago. The authors were writers and illustrators Jay Lynch and Glenn Bray, and the magazine was called Fanboy, a word Lynch had adapted from a piece of Florida slang from his childhood, funboy.74
Fanboy magazine was a pencil-and-paper effort with an almost nonexistent print run. Yet it gave the world a term for the particular obsessive species of fandom associated with comic collection and, soon, technology and gadgets.
Specifically, fanboy has come to be used as a disparaging (although sometimes affectionate, especially if self-described) label for those with a particular loyalty to one brand, fictional world or other geek topic of choice. Search on Google for “Apple fanboy” and you’ll find around three-quarters of a million results, complete with a Wikipedia entry suggesting the synonym “Apple evangelist.”
It wasn’t until the second half of the 1990s that the notion of technology fanboys really took off. Since then, there has been no turning back, thanks in large part to the torrents of online content generated by those avidly interested in comics, science fiction and fantasy. As once “cult” pursuits have become increasingly mainstream, the parallel term fangirl has come into use, complete with a similar satirical edge. Meanwhile, a Japanese term coined in the early 1980s—otaku, derived ultimately from an honorific pronoun—has been adopted internationally as a description of extreme commitment to comics, video games or gadgets.
Today, to call someone who disagrees with you a “fanboy” or “fangirl” during an online debate is to level one of the commonest accusations in the digital realm: that they’re blinded by obsession and have no sense of proportion. Equally for the increasingly huge numbers of self-identified fanboys and fangirls who populate both online forums and cult conventions like San Diego’s legendary Comic-Con International, this may just be the proudest twenty-first-century title of all.