The popularity of Taylor Swift has been growing rapidly on social media after the release of her ‘Midnights’ album on 21 October 2022. The lead single of the album, ‘Anti- Hero’ and the ‘Anti-Hero Challenge’ initiated by the singer inspired 17 thousand fans (Swifties) to share their own anti-heroic stories inspired by the song. The aim of the study is to examine the contribution of the Swifties online fan community to the ‘Anti-Hero Challenge’ on YouTube Shorts. The research interests revolve around Swifties’ prosumption practices in a dialogical relationship with the original music media material, the fan community, the platform, and the artist. The goal of the analysis is to demonstrate how Swifties use YouTube Shorts for both personal and communal expression by means of prosumption. Prosumption refers to the synchronous production and consumption of media content in the field of Media and Communication Studies (Zajc 2015:29). The thesis illustrates how online performances, interactions, and discussions nurtured by prosumption practices shape and maintain the Swifties fan community on YouTube Shorts. The study applies the Uses and Gratifications Theory and Netnography to scrutinize how Swifties reuse Taylor Swift’s song ‘Anti-Hero’ to make their own media products, and give each other feedback. The findings indicate that online fan prosumption and discussion practices not only foster entertaining, humorous, creative, and challenging self-expression but also provide pathways for communal exchange.  Swifties fan community members play a dual role in not only being active audiences and critics of ‘Anti-Hero’ but also of fellow fan prosumers. Swiftie prosumers and commenters of the ‘Anti-Hero Challenge’ videos also draw attention to controversial societal problems and call for change. The findings indicate the beginning of an era where the boundaries between music production and consumption dissolve. The thesis calls for further scientific inquiry into music fan communities’ prosumption practices online and offline.

Fans and fandoms are ever more salient aspects of our everyday lives offline and linked to the Internet's growing influence also online, particularly on social media. While fans have generally been pathologized via mass media but also early academic representations especially prior to the founding of the interdisciplinary Fan Studies in the 1970s/1980s, which sought to actively counter negative fan representations and foreground fans' creative productivity, nowadays, even though many types of fans have been 'mainstreamed' and are generally accepted, specific fan types are still systematically discriminated against - even within Fan Studies - along the lines of socio-demographic variables. These marginalised fans are predominantly female, young, queer and non-white. Moreover, even though Fan Studies define fan identity as one of their focal concerns, linguistic research on fan identity, particularly regarding its narrative and interactive construction, has widely been neglected. However, as narrative interaction and specifically small stories (as propsed within the small story paradigm by Bamberg & Georgakopoulou, 2007/8) have been found to play a very important role in the construction of identity, the investigation of how fan identity is constructed via small stories and - given the centrality of collective fandoms for fans - specifically shared (group) stories can severely contribute to fan (identity) research. Thus, combining decidedly linguistic research on narrative fan identity construction and the inclusion of previously marginalised fan communities, this thesis focuses on the construction of fan identity of Taylor Swift fans (Swifties) - a predominantly female and young fandom that has been ridiculed by mass media and dominant discourses - via shared stories. More specifically this study analyses the construction of Swiftie fan identity via shared stories both online in nicknames on Tumblr and Twitter and face to face in the form of a positioning analysis investigating the interactions of a Zoom focus group made up of five German Swifties. This research finds that within Swiftie nicknames Swiftie fan identity is centrally constructed by means of variously highly condensed, combined and/or personalised references (to shared stories of the overarching Swiftie community). The focus group interactions then reveal various positioning practices that are strongly intertwined with (often) more elaborate shared stories, which are 'shared' by the Swiftie participants both with regards to experiences on the story level and their interactive co-construction on the level of interaction. Despite their diverging local manifestations both within the investigated Swiftie nicknames and focus group interactions shared stories are centrally utilised to construct and communicate Swiftie fan identity as a particularly collectively experienced and defined ingroup identity that confers belonging and further functions as a shield against outgroup discrimination. Further research should then enlarge the present investigative focus to include also other online platforms and fan communicative acts, supplementary and also offline implemented focus groups and field studies, more heterogenous participants with regard to often neglected socio-demographic variables (next to age and gender) as well as other (marginalised) fandoms outside of the Swiftie community.