From: Betty Ragan bragan@aoc.nrao.edu
My usual retort to those who classify fandom with trainspotting (ie most of my acquaintance) is that nearly everyone watches television (some fans less than average), non-fans are content to sit and watch, while fans try to participate in social and/or creative ways.
IIRC, Jenkins had a hypothesis about that. Something along the lines of ordinary people wanting to define their own passive consumption of television (something like five hours a day for the average American, I think!) as "normal," even though most people have the feeling, deep down, that there may well be something vaguely wrong with staring passively at the tube like that for large chunks of time. But if you can point to someone whose TV-watching behavior is really unsual, it can make your own habits seem "normal" by comparison, and therefore, somehow, OK. "Yeah, sure, I watch a lot of TV, but at least I'm not like *those* people! They're obsessive!"
Pretty much as I remember it (long time since I ordered the book from the local library). But I think he goes even further, pointing out that fans themselves defend themselves in the very same way, by referring to the really obsessive geeks that they don't want to be associated with. This actually encourages the popular media view of fans as obsessive geeks by perpetuating the myth of some kind of Ultimate Geek who is out there, somewhere, and fans end up collaborating with the construction of this aprocyphal figure who has come to misrepresent them.
Neil