Week2 An ethnographic vignette of online fans community

[Last modified: October, 15 2024 01:03 AM]

After a brief interview with three k-pop fans, they told me that Weibo is the platform they most frequently use to engage in online star-chasing activities. In addition, Red, Bilibili, Twitter, Instagram, Douyin are also the platforms they often use. They gave me the reason why they list Weibo as first priority, Weibo has perfect fan communities, usually hundreds of thousands or even millions of fans gather in one community, with a wealth of resources, including images, videos, songs related to their favorite k-pop idols. Furthermore, there are also lots of engagement activities held by fans, such as poster design, control comments (kongping), anti-malicious activities (fanhei). Almost all forms of online engagements activities are included, so I chose Weibo to start my participatory observation.

Firstly, I browsed several Weibo Supertopic, which can be considered a kind of online fan community, usually named after a certain k-pop idol or idol group, with a large number of fans share content relates to this certain idol or idol group. Supertopic is managed by administrators and hosts, who are also members of fans. I have observed that, for Supertopic communities, whether they have millions of fans or just thousands of fans, they are well-constructed. Different communities have different content sections, one Supertopic usually includes 5-15 content sections, mainly about posts, trend, creators, offical resources, fan-created resources, fancam videos, online chat room and albums. For example, here are some screenshots of homepage in Supertopic about k-pop idol or idol group, it is clear that each Supertopic has various content sections and multiple content.

Another interesting finding is that the fans in Supertopic are keen to improve their level in Supertopic. They usually get points by signing in, liking, commenting and reposting the posts in Supertopic. Meanwhile, they can also gain points from post their own contents and get other fans interaction. When they enter certain level, they are qualified to apply for managers and hosts in Supertopic, and will get vitual bandge of honor as rewards. Within fans group, there are clear hierarchical distribution, higher level can be seen as more love and time they devote into their idol, and when they undate posts, they are more likely to acquire other fans’ interaction.

What makes me feel strange is that Weibo, as a social media platforms, users are mainly located in China, has such a huge fan base of k-pop stars in Supertopic community, and the fans carry out some spontaneous engagement activities, forming a set of independent hierarchical structure and sound content production and posting system, while the k-pop idols they follow are completely not involved in the whole process. Therefore, in the future research, I tend to explore their motivations for online engagement activities through in-depth interviews.

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