[Last modified: October, 6 2024 05:49 PM]
Topic:
Female Kpop Fans Online Engagement: the Self-expression, Production and Consumption on social media platform
Research Background:
Kpop culture has a wide influence on Asia, and the fan base is dominated by young women, mainly in South Korea, China and Japan. With the emergence of various social media platforms, fans can be seen on all digital platforms to carry out some online engagement behaviors based on star-chasing, as a subculture group, they have unified values and behavior patterns. Star-chasing has become a way of life, fans show continuous creativity and cohesion in their online engagement behavior, and participating in the process of content production and production is also a way of self-expression.
Research Question:
- What leads to the active online self-expression, production and consumption behaviors of k-pop female fans? What are their psychological motivations?
- What social media platforms do female k-pop fans prefer to use for engagement online star-chasing? What specific features do these platforms meet their needs?
- What online self-expression, production and consumption activities do k-pop female fans engage in?
- How do fans build, maintain their online communities? How do they interact with each other within their communities?
- How do these online engagement behavior in turn impact on themselves and society?
Methods
- Online Participant Observation: an essential method to perceive and analyze k-pop fans behavior, explore their identity recognition and transformation as creators, expressers, consumers by interpreting the online content they create, publish, consume and observing the interaction among fans group. I will join the communities of k-pop fans on social media platforms to participate in commenting and interacting with relevant engagement activities, and observe how other fans give feedback.
- Content Analysis: Analyze the texts, images, videos created by fans on social media platforms, focusing on the theme, language, style and other visual and auditory elements, classify and analyze the features of these contents.
- In-depth interviews: select 5-10 k-pop female fans with different age group and nationalities to conduct interview, investigate their motivations for engaging in online star-chasing activities, their choice of social media platforms, the way they interact with other fans, the process of their self-identity and self-expression, and how they feel about engaging in these activities.
- Case Study: choose representative engaging fan behaviors to conduct in-depth research, such as “Super Topic” in Weibo (a Chinese social media platform), which is a collective community for fans, to explore k-pop fans behaviors, and “Kongping”（controlling comments) under Hot Search topic, as well as topics on Tik Tok named in k-pop idols, to observe fans content production and consumption.
Potential Findings:
- The motivation for fans online engagement should be their high infatuation for k-pop idols, star-chasing satisfy their emotional needs. On the other hand, the limitation of time, geography distance or expense make them lack the opportunities to interact with their idols offline, so online engagement activities can serve as an alternative.
- In the process of online engagement, k-pop fans get opportunities to express their personality and find identity, and the sense of belongings can be enhanced when they engage in group fan activities.
- The content of fan production includes text, image, video and various forms, fans are both producers and consumers. Online consumption includes content consumption and material consumption, and some fans purchase idol peripheral products like albums, photocards, photobooks, stuffed toys.
- The influence can be multifaceted, it should be analyzed critically. Fans online behavior is often considered as crazy and ridiculous due to the bad social impacts of some previous events. Excessive engagement might have harmful impacts on individuals, especially for younger fans, whose behavior need to be counseled and corrected.