Everything I Need I Get from You: How Fangirls Created the Internet as We Know It

by Kaitlyn Tiffany

Life will be happier for the on-line individual because the people with whom one interacts most strongly will be selected more by commonality of interests and goals than by accidents of proximity.

if i die tonight tell one direction I’ll see them in hell

“But don’t say ‘chonce.’” At that, the crowd screams as if they have just found out they’re alive.

I’ll spend every crowded train ride and mandatory all-hands meeting and one-year-old’s birthday party washing my eyes with “We took a chonce.”

“Women are the internet, and the internet is women,”

Yet a fangirl still exists in contradiction to the dominant culture. She’s not considered normal or sane; her refusal to accept things the way they are is one of her defining characteristics.

In 2015, a four-year-old tweet from Louis Tomlinson—“Always in my heart @Harry_Styles. Yours sincerely, Louis”—was retweeted enough times for it to become the second-most retweeted message in the site’s history—edging out Barack Obama’s 2012 reelection victory tweet

In public, fangirls were a joke: a ball of hysteria, so noisy! On the internet, the joke was on everybody else.

For me, One Direction arrived just in time—like being yanked out of the crosswalk a second before the bus plows through.

On Tumblr, they created new language, spoke in code, and popularized the core phraseology of our time, including “I want [X] to run me over with their car.”

which included such methodical and bureaucratic techniques as teaching international acquaintances how to fake American IP addresses and thereby accrue Spotify and YouTube streams that would count on the Billboard charts.

these fans have maintained a creator’s hand throughout those artists’ careers, treating them as collaborative projects. They take responsibility for every setback and share in the thrill of every success.

The twist, as revealed in the song’s chorus, is that I might. “Everything I need I get from you,” the four of them say to me in turn.

“One Direction reminds me that love, joy, giddiness, even hysteria are crucibles of intelligence,”

I like One Direction because their music reminds me of myself. I’m nineteen and I’m not nineteen; I get to hold the two images side by side and think about the ways in which I’m changing and the ways in which I will always be the same.

a fan reportedly wrote to him: “The sweetest music to my ears would be to hear Rudy play a march at your and Hellinger’s funeral.”

When she went to her first and only One Direction concert in 2014, in Atlanta, she went alone and screamed. “As soon as I set foot in that stadium, I lost it,”

“I’m a straight male, and that’s not a big demographic for One Direction fans,” he said. “But I’m like, listen, I could play you like five songs and change your mind right now.” “A lot of people think I’m putting it on but it’s a genuine thing I really enjoy,”

They’ve also edited them and recirculated them and used them as the inspiration for a range of creative works so enormous—and largely uncatalogued—that it can’t even be grasped.

“Imagine: niall horan crawling inside your ear” goes one of my favorite Tumblr posts. “you tell him to stop, but he is in there.”

“There are no girls on the internet,”

Though men had been the early adopters of the internet, women were the early adopters of social media—

Tumblr’s basic premise—as a somewhat secretive space for identity exploration through multimedia—

One Direction’s dreamily offensive debut single, “What Makes You Beautiful”—“

“Social media has become the new radio. It’s never broken an act globally like this before.”

On Twitter, anyone who doesn’t remember all of that is a “local.”

(They also tend to lose their accounts over repeated infractions of other rules—such as those against tweeting death threats at people.)

A person could be a Justin Bieber fan or a person could be a One Direction fan,

“oomf,” meaning “one of my followers,” or an “IRL,” meaning someone who also exists in one’s offline life.

In the same way that holidays give shape to formless years,

If the world ends tomorrow, we say over and over, just let One Direction know that they ruined our lives and we’ll see them in hell.