The Study of Fans and Fandom Culture : Case Study on the C-pop and K-pop Fandom Example

Abstract

In 2012, as the music video of Gangnam Style became the most liked video on YouTube, Korean pop music has entered the international perspective and has shown unbelievable popularity worldwide in recent years. With the continuous enlargement and innovation of the music genre of K-pop, idol groups gained great popularity both domestically and internationally. It has gradually evolved from the appreciation of music to the worship of idol. With the widespread popularity of the Internet and the rapid development of diversified social media platforms, the action of star-chasing increases by degrees from offline activities to online activities. Fans all over the world are able to complete the stanning pastime through these platforms such as Twitter, Instagram and Weibo. At this point, the fandom culture was formed. The Participatory Culture proposed by Henry Jenkins (2015) is clearly reflected in the fandom culture that in the Web2.0 era, fans are the earliest contacts of new media technology and the most active group among media audiences. The formation of fandom is also promoting the emergence of new ways of thinking and behaviors, especially in East Asia where a systematized fandom culture has been formed along with a derived series of fandom industries. The British media theorist and sociologist Dick Hebdige (1995) regards the subculture of resistance as a search for identification, and the fandom culture echoes this. In order to have an in-depth exploration of the fandom culture, the qualitative research method of interview and the quantitative research method of survey will be used to analyze the influence of fandom culture on people’s thinking patterns and behaviors along with society, and also the pros and cons of fandom culture will be discussed in this thesis.