The Here And Now

I've been thinking about this issue a lot lately, as you might expect, and one of the things I've been thinking about is the difference between being A Fan and being In Fandom. I completely agree that being a fan means being actively engaged (in any of a variety of ways!) and that the engagement doesn't have to be social... but I do think that *fandom* is social. Not necessarily social in the sense of interacting socially -- fandom includes readers and lurkers, as you say! But reading and lurking are still social in that they involve seeking out the fic/essays/art/etc. of other fans, which is, I think, a step beyond just thinking about the show or imagining missing scenes or writing drawer fic.