ABSTRACT

I first became interested in Justin Bieber when I heard my students and others denigrating his teen girl fans, the ‘Beliebers’. They were seen as ‘obsessive’, ‘crazy’, and all the other disqualifying words that have been used to describe female fans of popular music over the years (Garratt 1990; Ehrenreich et al. 1992). 1 What was different with Bieber’s rise to fame in 2009–2010 was how his fans had been using the new technology of Twitter to promote their star. Alexy Khrabrov and George Cybenko noted their ‘surprising discovery’ of the ‘Bieber ecosystem’ in an early quantitative network analysis of Twitter: “The most influential person in Twitter mentions in our dataset, each day, every day of the study, is Justin Bieber” (Khrabrov and Cybenko 2010, 292). These authors also affirmed the agency of Bieber’s mainly female fans, who engage in “active and incessant manipulation of the pagerank by constantly mentioning each other…. The top beliebers … trade shouts and create multiple Twitter accounts for focused subgroups, tending them regularly, and team with other top beliebers to do it, positioning themselves at the head of the pack” (Khrabrov and Cybenko 2010, 292–293).