Fanlore:Featured Article Archives/2020: Week 43

Balkanization is used in fandom to describe the de-centralization of fandom and fannish communities, in various different contexts.

In the history of online fandom, many fans consider it something that mainly happened in between 1998 and 2005, but the term was used as early as 1997. During this period, the creation of mailing lists became accessible to everyone with the advent of Onelist and eGroups (later Yahoo! Groups), resulting in what had previously been a very centralized fannish experience increasingly splintering off into more specialized discussion groups and topics.

The term was applied again to the fandom migration to LiveJournal, on which fans were even more able to curate their own "bubble" of fandom by creating and joining communities, or by fine-tuning who could and couldn't access their journal. However, it largely fell out of usage as this way of doing fandom became the new norm, and the number of online platforms available to fans only increased.

The term was also used in convention culture to refer to the increasing separation of con-going fans along interest/fanac lines, dividing comics fans from sci-fi fans and cosplayers from filkers.