"Don't judge a book by its cover ... by its leather cover ... by its human skin-looking cover. Don't ever judge that book. (NightValeRadio, 2013)

(Wilson, 2012)

Participating in a fandom is one way to express a posthumanist cyborg identity. Technology has always been a part of the fandom experience; even before the mass migration of fandom from physical mailing lists and ‘zines onto the Internet in the late 1980s/90s. As a specific example, for the Welcome to Night Vale fandom, technology is absolutely essential to consuming the source material, and therefore participating in the fandom and building an identity as part of the WtNV fandom. WtNV is a podcast released solely through Internet music/podcast subscription services, and the fandom only exists when and if humans interact with this podcast. Posthumanism “[c]hallenges the boundaries between the human and the natural world and the mechanical and the technological” (Van Luyn, 2015), and so fandom, with its privileging of the communal experience over the individual, is posthumanist. The cyborg lies where the technological and the organic interact (McNeill, 2012). Through the chosen distribution services of the source material, WtNV forces its fandom to function as cyborgs.

The Welcome to Night Vale fandom is spread out across multiple social media platforms. While I believe Tumblr to be the most popular, Twitter is also quite popular, due to the various ‘official’ WtNV-related accounts present. There is an official WtNV twitter, which posts both official updates on coming events, and just plain old creepy stuff, and the vast majority of the producers, writers, and voice actors have accounts. Fandom often treats these official accounts as canon source material, even if they contradict implications or outright statements in the podcast. This sense of authority, whether false or deserved, allows power to be weighted unequally in favour of these people, and often forces changes on the way fandom is able to interact with the source material.

REFERENCES

McNeill, L. (2012). There is no “I” in network: Social networking sites and posthuman auto/biography. Biography 35(1), 65-82. Retrieved From http://muse.jhu.edu/

Night ValeRadio. (2013, October 4). Don’t judge a book by its cover … by its leather cover … by its human skin-looking cover. Don’t ever judge that book [Tweet]. Retrieved from https://twitter.com/nightvaleradio/status/386172991752519680?lang=en

Van Luyn, A. (2015). BA1002: Networked Narratives: Intertextuality [PowerPoint slides]. Retrieved from http://learnjcu.jcu.edu.au

IMAGE REFERENCES
Wilson, Rob (Artist). (2012). Welcome to Night Vale website banner [Image]. Retrieved from commonplacebooks.com