3: Archers Fandom and the Online Public Sphere

I can ‘out’ myself as someone who has listened to The Archers since early childhood, so in my case, from the late 1960s. Like my somewhat passive support for Liverpool FC and a harder fascination, after listening to years of my parents bickering, with why people find it so difficult to talk about politics without losing their cool, this has stayed with me well into middle age. In my book, Political Participation on Social Media: The Lived Experience of Online Debate (2021), published during the COVID-19 pandemic, I explore the last of these childhood preoccupations through the accounts of people in the United Kingdom who have taken part in political debates on social media. That book attempted to pick apart some of the confluence of factors, ranging from ideology to physiology and from nurture to culture, which meet to shape online political discussion. It is based on the real-life accounts of 85 people and contains an untypical amount of swearing for an academic monograph.