Giving and Receiving: Reciprocal Review Exchange in Online Fanfiction Communities

Abstract

Online fanfiction communities enable young people to make connections through their shared interests. Prior research has found that informal learning takes place in fanfiction platforms through distributed mentoring, which includes the writing and receiving of story reviews to one another that have significant effects on young authors' literacy skill development. The pandemic lockdown has limited young people's access to forming social connections, and it also stimulated engagement in online informal learning. Therefore, it is crucial to study online fanfiction communities as a prototype for designing future informal learning platforms. This study focuses on reviewing, one of the main components of distributed mentoring, to explore whether reciprocal patterns exist in the sending and receiving of reviews among fanfiction authors. We used a social network analysis approach by modeling users' interactions through reviews as directed graphs and performed correlation analysis to test the proposed hypotheses. The results provided significant evidence that supports the existence of reciprocal patterns among users' interactions through reviews.