If I do a term paper on Keanu online fandom, and interview people here, what kind of things would you want to talk about? (or have a lot to talk about).

My class is on online communities / computer-mediated environments, so that has to be a focus of the paper (e.g. I can't talk about offline fanclubs).

It has to involve original research that seeks to answer some question. I can't think up any research questions at the moment, though.

Some of the topics covered by the class include:
- the Proteus effect, or avatar effect: where people's offline behaviour and personality can be affected by the online personas they adopt, in role-playing games or otherwise
- online presence/immersion: the feeling of 'being there' when online
- group collaboration in virtual teams, and the development of conflict and trust in such teams
- information sharing, content creation and collaboration online
- group polarisation, online anonymity, extremism, etc

I've been considering the idea of celebrity involvement in social media, and how this changes the fan/celebrity relationship; or how the internet has enabled a sort of hyper-fandom where fans can be aware of a celebrity's every move, down to where they currently are, and the various implications of this - though I'm not sure if that's completely on the topic of computer communication, or what kind of research question I can come up around that. It might also be better to use a different case study if I'm doing that, since Keanu isn't one of those actors who are on Twitter and Facebook and post photos of their pets on Instagram.

and argh. I was also thinking about the issue of online anonymity and how it has enabled people to be more critical or outright hateful, as the numerous fish have demonstrated, but I can't really formulate an actual research question around that either.

Any ideas? Or just questions you might have about online fandom that you think should be researched on?

Thanks!

I'm currently leaning towards investigating the factors that attract people towards joining an online fandom community - why some actors seem to get huge online followings while others don't, even if they're relatively equally famous/nice/good-looking/etc; what aspects of an online community make people want to contribute, or stay on in the long term, and so on.