This Has Something To Do With Computers, Doesn’t It? The Internet?

The first time I ever accessed the internet I searched for The X-Files.¹ I was 16, on a week-long writing project, and discovered the alt.tv.xfiles Usenet group in a small room filled with blocky PCs. When we got the internet at home I found the BBC Cult message boards on which I spent many hours writing fanfic (which I still have saved on floppy disk) and discussing the show with other fans around the world.

In many ways, the history of The X-Files is closely linked with the history of the internet. X-Files fans in the 90s, referred to as Philes, were young, highly educated, technologically adept viewers who wanted to discuss the series with a like-minded audience, and it’s no surprise that the first X-Files online fan site was created on the Usenet newsgroup just three months after the pilot episode premiered in September 1993. During its first day, posts made to alt.tv.x-files discussed Mulder’s mysterious informant, Deep Throat, debated Scully’s medical degree, and analysed the show’s standing in the Neilson ratings—a breadth of topics that continue to be discussed by fans even beyond the show’s 2016 revival.

It seems strange to think of the 1990s as history; it was only 30 years ago, after all.² But if we think about how much has changed since then, it makes sense to focus on what the decade can tell us about the early days of digital fandom. Brian Lowry suggests that “fan reaction to the series has become as much a part of The X-Files story as the show itself,” citing fan discussion on the internet as a key element.³ Fans created a presence for the show online before Fox did; by the time the official website appeared in June 1995, scores of fan-created websites and message boards already existed, offering a range of content that it would take years for Fox to compete with. As Bambi Haggins suggests, The X-Files fan pages arguably set the standard for impressive fandom sites:

. . . for lustful chatting and sophisticated star worship, see David Duchovny Estrogen Brigade [DDEB] website brought to you by Sarah Steagall et al; for the perusal of extensive archival notes, see Cliff Chen’s slightly dated but extremely thorough X-Files FAQ’, for a taste of wryly humorous X-Files dialogue, see over fifty online list of “Mulderisms & Scullyisms”; and to post messages to other X-Philes, see alt.tv.x-files, which, even in this post-series era, remains an active space for online discourse.⁴

Of course, Philes weren’t the only ones to discuss their favourite shows online; Nancy Baym details the r.a.t.s. newsgroup, dedicated to the discussion of soaps fandom, which has its origins in the net.tv Usenet group in 1984 while Francesca Coppa points out that the Forever Knight fandom can lay claim to having the first online mailing list, started in December 1992.⁵ Crossover also existed between fan groups online. As Susan J. Clerc highlights, “DDEB was created by a member of two similar Star Trek groups, the Star Fleet Ladies’ Auxiliary Embroidery and Baking Society and the Patrick Stewart Estrogen Brigade,” and actors in science fiction shows were known to discuss their internet fans in interviews.⁶

Writers for the show were certainly active in early online fan communities. Carter himself has recognized that the growth of the internet came at a good time for the growth of the show, saying the internet was like an “interactive tool” helping him measure the “pulse” of the audience⁷ while Frank Spotnitz recalls how fan discussion online led to him to writing a season 3 episode:

I remember one specific instance where I was actually inspired to write an episode because of something I read on a message board. It was during the third season, and I was flying back from a fan convention in Minnesota when I read one comment noting that we hadn’t followed up on the death of Scully’s sister earlier in the year. I realized that this was not only true, but an enormous oversight. I thought about it all the way to the airport, and by the time my plane landed in Los Angeles, I’d outlined most of the episode that became “Piper Maru.”⁸

While Philes are not alone in being a fandom with an early, and active, internet presence, the dialogue between fans and writers continued throughout the series, reflected in implicit and explicit references to the fandom within the show itself. Langly’s remark in “One Breath” that “We’re all hopping on the internet to nitpick the scientific inaccuracies of Earth 2” is a clear nod to the detailed analysis of episodes, while the names of online fans appeared in the passenger manifest in “Little Green Men.” It took until season 7 for Fox’s online presence began to offer news, episode guides, and eventually online chats with Carter, Duchovny, and Gillian Anderson, while X-Files fan practices, terminology, and behaviours had been slowly making their way into the broader world of internet fan communities. Terms like “shipping,” commonly used today in fandoms from Doctor Who to K-pop, originated with The X-Files, as did the popularization of show- and fandom-specific acronyms only understandable to those within the fandom (Alp, 2021).⁹

The X-Files was instrumental in linking fans, producers, and texts in a way that hadn’t been done previously. The emergence of the internet in conjunction with The X-Files allowed for a new type of communication between consumers and creators–a communication process that continues in fandom to this day, facilitated by the internet. Philes may not have foreseen this when we first started posting fic, sharing theories and discussing the finer details of Mulder and Scully’s relationship, but we’ve maintained our place in the history of fandom, continuing to share even as new platforms like TikTok have replaced Usenet groups and mailing lists.

1. The title comes from the season 5 episode “The Unusual Suspects.”
2. Editor’s note: we apologize to anyone harmed by reading this sentence.
3. Brian Lowry, The Truth Is Out There: The Official Guide To The X-Files (New York: Harper Collins, 1995), 239.
4. Bambi L. Haggins, “Apocrypha Meets the Pentagon Papers: The Appeals of The X-Files to the X-Phile,” Journal of Film and Video 53, no. 4 (2002): 12.
5. Nancy Baym, Tune In, Log On: Soaps, Fandom, and Online Community (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 2000): 6; Francesca Coppa, “A Brief History of Media Fandom,” in Fan Fiction and Fan Communities in the Age of the Internet, ed. Karen Hellekson & Kristina Busse, (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2006), 53. Baym also points out that “the precise history of soap opera discussion on the Internet is not well documented” and certainly the Internet history of science-fiction fandom has been far more widely discussed in scholarship.
6. Susan J. Clerc, “DDEB, GATB, MPPB, and Ratboy: The X-Files’ Media Fandom, Online and Off” in Deny All knowledge: Reading the X-Files ,David Lavery, Angela Hague, & Marla Cartwright, eds., (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press 1996), 43.
7. Haggins, 13.
8. Bethan Jones, “The Fandom Is Out There: Social Media and The X-Files Online” in Fan CULTure: Essays on participatory fandom in the 21st century, Kristin M. Barton and Jonathan Malcolm Lampley, eds., (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2013), 95.
9. Aja Romano, “Canon, fanon, shipping and more: a glossary of the tricky terminology that makes up fan culture,” Vox, 7 June 2016. Accessed 20 December 2023. https://www.vox.com/2016/6/7/11858680/fandom-glossary-fanfiction-explained; Duru Alp, “How “The X-Files” Shaped Online Fandom Culture As We Know It,” Medium, 17 March 2021. Accessed 20 December 2023. https://mediummagazine.nl/how-the-x-files-shaped-online-fandom-culture-as-we-know-it/