Milifandom: The fan girls are coming.

Yesterday something a bit weird happened.

Ed Miliband Has Developed A Small But Growing Fandom Of Teen Girls

Looking at the Buzzfeed article, and at some of the commentary this morning, you can find it an easily satirised and dismissed bit of nonsense. It’s just young girls being a bit silly and weird. Or, if you’re jaded and bit cynical, it’s all a set up and campaign spin.

Two days ago though the Guardian posted this article.

Stand up and be counted: a message to young female voters

At the last election only 39% of women in the 18-24 age group bothered to turn out. The young female demographic is considered to be particularly disengaged from politics. Ironically, this is also the best educated generation of females ever. They massively outstrip their male counterparts in tests.

The milifandom hashtag seems to have come about because a few young women got fed up with the mainstream media portrayal of Ed Miliband. These aren’t people who usually get involved in politics. They don’t have political blogs, they don’t necessarily follow the minutiae of politics or the campaign. What they do know is celebrity and fandom.

I’ve being doing online fandom for 25 years. Fandom to me is a second language. When I started out, fandom was a weird thing. It didn’t make you a popular person to be in one. Geek was not cool. These young women though grew up with it. To them, it is normal and it is cool. They’re not just the young women of Twitter, they’re the young women of Tumblr.

They grew up in a world obsessed with selling them celebrity culture, where it was normal to be part of a fandom, soaking up a culture that you’re somewhat spoon-fed by media spin and PR experts. In the real world, the whole tabloid culture of society encourages it because it sells magazines, and product, and advertising.

These young girls don’t write blogs and articles when something engages and fires them up. They take to Twitter and they take to Tumblr, and Instagram, and Pinterest. They think visual and short.

Of course they created a fandom; that’s their first language. It doesn’t mean it’s silly. This is them subverting the celebrity culture and technology platforms that they understand instinctively.

I commented last night that the fandom was evolving at rapid speed. Of course it did, for me those developmental stages of how a fandom creates itself happened over decades. For them, they’re just how a fandom works. A fandom reaching maturity (for good and ill) over the course of a few hours because the people involved know all the steps.

You can dismiss milifandom as silliness, but what I’m seeing is a group of people who understand how the media works because it was taught to them. It was taught to manipulate them and sell things to them, but the cat’s out of the bag. They know it works and they know how to subvert it.

The young women just got involved in politics using a language that they’re masters in. Maybe they wont have a huge impact on this election, but they understand the language of the future. Old white guys in politics, it’s possible you should be a little afraid. The fan girls are coming.