It's not just fandom. It's online communities in general. MetaFilter (http://www.metafilter.com) melts down all the time (and if you're interested, you can see lots of MetaArguing (http://metatalk.metafilter.com/) going on.)
Clay Shirky has written some great papers on this sort of thing...just Google for his name, you'll find them.
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Clay Shirky has written some great papers on this sort of thing...just Google for his name, you'll find them.