My PhD project will focus on the website PartoftheGame.TV.

The thesis title PartOfTheWeb is a play on words deriving from PartoftheGame.TV, a website designed in a Web 2.0 environment with videos presented by professional journalists, user generated videos, chatchannels, voting systems and so on. The website is owned by Carlsberg (and run by a media company called In2Media). The main purpose of the website as a platform or a community for football fans is to develop a space for exchanging views on football in addition to uploading and watching fan videos. The idea underlying this website defies traditional imaginaries of football fan culture for two reasons: First, football fan culture is heavily dominated by a tendency towards inclusion and exclusion in relation to a specific football club (recent theory uses the term ‘anti-fan’ as a method of understanding the identity-related processes involved in this logic). Second, football culture is also a phenomenon in which physical presence is very important. While this problem will be central to my PhD, the study will more generally discuss the sociology of the internet (or ‘the age of the internet’).

In most Danish sociological literature the internet and the media in general are understood (if discussed at all) as tools aimed at other purposes and goals. Rarely are they analyzed as separate social spaces or battlegrounds. Consequently, one main purpose of my study is to develop a framework for understanding and analyzing the internet as an autonomous social space or structure, while taking into account the discussion of the online/offline dichotomy. This can be divided into different tasks: First I need to discuss and develop a general theoretical framework for conceptualizing virtual spaces. This work is centred on that of Pierre Bourdieu and his study of different social fields. His unique approach is based on a statistical technique called correspondence analysis, which I will use as well. Bourdieu has mapped a wide area of different social fields but he leaves few clues, as to how to articulate social relations on the internet as a unique social structure, i.e., how to conceptualize websites, users, profiles, portals etc. Therefore I need to discuss in which way the field analytical perspective can be applied to social relations on the internet. I believe that my previous experience with Web Analytics will help new insights into the methodological considerations of applying these traditional sociological tools in this new virtual environment.

Second I need to reflect on the changing nature of social relations as mediated through the new digital media, notably the internet. Here I will take advantage of the medium theoretical tradition within media studies. This tradition, based on the classical works of Harold Innis, Marshall McLuhan and Joshua Meyrowitz, understands the media not as just another tool but as a fundamental basis of human togetherness and history. In this view human history is deeply influenced by the development of media technologies. As print, radio and television have already made a deep impact on our society, so will the new digital media. In my earlier studies on internet dating I showed how one can convincingly conceptualize these changes through ideas of postmodern thought. In this study I hope to demonstrate that we can extend these ideas to a more general perspective in relation to online communities.

From this theoretical perspective I will explore what it means to be a part of an internet community, and how that meaning translates into acting and feeling: And, in the cases of fan cultures, does the absence of physical presence change the audience from that of offline fan cultures?