Nancy Baym

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Nancy Baym, Ph.D. is an American academic, currently an Associate Professor of Communication Studies at the University of Kansas. She is a co-founder and former president of the Association of Internet Researchers, and serves on the board of several academic journals covering new media and communication.

She is the author of Tune In, Log On: Soaps, Fandom, and Online Community (2000), a book which performs an ethnographic analysis on soap opera fans, specifically their activity in rec.arts.tv.soaps (an Internet forum), making it a notable work in the fields of both Audience Studies and Cyberculture Studies. In this book, Baym argues that soap opera fans form "a dynamic community of people with unique voices, distinctive traditions, and enjoyable relationships." Her continuing interest in fans and fandom led her, in 2006, to start up a weblog, "Online Fandom" [1], dedicated to coverage of "news and perspectives on fan communication."

Her most widely-cited article is "The Emergence of On-line Community," written in 1995. It appeared in the 1998 anthology Cybersociety: communication and community and is considered a groundbreaking work in the study of online community.

In addition to contributing to a number of other anthologies on the topics of social communication, new media, and fandom, she has also provided commentary for news pieces on various aspects of Internet culture (including Second Life, online dating, and online communities), appearing in both print and television news outlets.