When deciding how to cite social media posts in this book, I referred to the approach used in A Tumblr Book: Platform and Cultures, edited by Allison McCracken, Alexander Cho, Louisa Stein, and Indira Neill Hoch, and published by University of Michigan Press in 2020. “As user-scholars of Tumblr,” they write, “we are aware of the degree to which posts can be decontextualized and recirculated in harmful ways or can allow users to be easily targeted through search engines.” While many social media posts have a natural expectation of publicness, Tumblr’s structural insularity demands different consideration, as do posts made on any platform by people who do not have a large online following and would not expect to see their words reappearing in this context.
With this in mind, I attempted to contact every person whose social media posts I intended to quote significantly or describe in detail in the book. Most asked to be identified in these notes by their usernames only; if I could not get in contact with someone, I have opted not to identify them at all, with a few exceptions for users who are already well known in fandom circles. (The editors of A Tumblr Book also offered Tumblr users whose posts were quoted in their book the option to have their words “slightly altered to prevent them from being searchable,” but I did not make this offer.) If a post was deleted after I’d seen it, I was sometimes able to use the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine to recover it. I note a few instances in which this was not possible, where I had to rely on my notes as the source for the original text.
Though not directly referenced, for context about subcultural and fandom studies, I read and benefited from Matt Hills’s Fan Cultures, Katherine Larsen and Lynn S. Zubernis’s Fangasm: Supernatural Fangirls, Rob Sheffield’s Dreaming the Beatles: The Love Story of One Band and the Whole World, Gretchen McCulloch’s Because Internet: Understanding the New Rules of Language, and Zoe Fraade-Blanar and Aaron M. Glazer’s Superfandom: How Our Obsessions Are Changing What We Buy and Who We Are, as well as Hop on Pop: The Politics and Pleasures of Popular Culture, edited by Henry Jenkins, Tara McPherson, and Jane Shattuc; Girl Wide Web: Girls, the Internet, and the Negotiation of Identity and Girl Wide Web 2.0: Revisiting Girls, the Internet, and the Negotiation of Identity, edited by Sharon R. Mazzarella; the second edition of Fandom: Identities and Communities in a Mediated World, edited by Jonathan Gray, Cornel Sandvoss, and C. Lee Harrington; and the second edition of The Subcultures Reader, edited by Ken Geldner.