The Star Of K-pop, Bts, And Their Relation To Fans

In today's generation, music with various languages has gain traction with the international audience. One of them is Korean music, or what is often referred to as KPOP. Not knowing the language doesn't stop us from enjoying it. KPOP has become a global sensation that gives strong impacts to non-Koreans, especially when the artist fuses its music style to fit Western archetypes. The media integrates the idea of having KPOP groups collaborating with Western mainstream celebrities like Steve Aoki, Dua Lipa, Hasley and many others.

One current world-class boy group is BTS (Bangtan Sonyeondan) from BigHit Entertainment. Their popularity reached its peak in 2017, and in 2018 they break a lot of records and went to perform in the Billboard Music Award after winning the Social Artist Award. Originally, BTS was just a small group from South Korea, but being introduced by social media algorithms like Facebook, Instagram and Twitter, this particular group gains a lot of exposure as they allow people to see what they’re missing. This wouldn’t work without their fandom. Fandoms are communities created by fans in support of their idol preference. Using different methods to support – like voting on award shows, buying their albums or streaming music videos – creates a hierarchy of fandoms where those in a higher position (status) are most successful.

Emphasising the status affordance of fan culture, achievements are seen as a big milestone and a way to make some fandom stand out in comparison to others. However, taking account of how serious fandom takes competitions, it creates a possible outcome of unhealthy competition. Becoming more biased towards some groups propose the attention that fans aren't paying as much attention to the content but rather the bragging rights. This can be seen from the behaviour mostly directed towards the BTS fandom – ARMY. Using bragging rights to motivate the idea of ‘fandom wars’ creates the rivalries on where fans point out small flaws of the opposing groups commonly by statistics that help strengthen their argument. They also bring up how the company from the group affect their popularity and status, especially in the case of big 3 privilege (YG, SM, JYP entertainment).

Background Research: 

Introduction to ‘Black Box’ in Different Platforms

As stated by Michele Wilson (2017), algorithms make things happen. Designed to be executed to certain desires, needs and possibilities. In online spaces, algorithms are central to the ways communication and information are located, retrieved, filtered, and presented. Thus, we curate what we see online and frame what they tell us. Associating with the black box, the concept of the black box is crafted towards the concept of a heuristic device that helps discuss the nature of algorithms in the media platform. “An object whose inner functioning cannot be known - at least not by observation, since the blackness of the box obscures vision” (Bucher 2018, p 4) shares how we might attend to and study algorithms depending on their data availability.

Twitter doesn’t contain one algorithm but a collection of algorithms working together to create a unified experience in terms of ‘culture of experimentation’. What this means is that the algorithms primarily do things by virtue of assistance. They help users find something they are searching for, directing the attention to the ‘most important’ content, provide and limit access to information and similarly to Instagram, they make recommendations and suggestion for advertisement. In Facebook, they prioritise the popularity of posts and interactions in the user’s newsfeed. However, it cannot simply be understood by opening the black box, as Latour reminds us that black boxes are obscure to the network. For example, Facebook trending feature should be the result of an objective algorithm, but human editors employed to oversee the trending topics.

Raising an argument, displays how black box works as the necessity to keep details closed and obscured. Knowledge must be covered in order to protect a commercial formula because, without secrecy, systems would cease to work properly. Holding this message, further discussion will be explored on the idea of how different platforms appeal the ‘black box’ and showcase different behaviour (affordances) in BTS fandom, ARMY.

BTS Fandom and Social Media Platforms

Creating a connection between the black box concepts, we can understand what’s hidden and kept secret from the real world, can be altered by the need to be physically available. This plays on the basis of seeing what we publicly don’t see about the fandom’s true behaviour. Hence, by actively engaging in different social media platforms (Facebook, Twitter and Instagram), we seek for what stays hidden in those platforms about ARMY.

Featuring to trigger social behaviour, Facebook is a system of social affordance and is designed to personally fit in our daily lives. Looking at the history, social structures and culture, Facebook set the boundary between individuals and their social practice engagement, which clearly influence people’s interpretation of it. Creating a connection through its content, Facebook gives less restrictive in their language; we can ‘like’ not only friends’ posts but also inanimate objects. Forming a social group, ARMY creates fan pages to appeal their love for BTS while building a different identity who continually arbitrating their purpose and position within the group itself. Allowing them to create a group and connect and interact with other people with the same preference indicate that Facebook is personal. Building a vastly different identity (other than your own profile) construct new beginning. BTS fan pages post about many things such as BTS accomplishments - posting something thoughtful about performance achievement in Billboard, SNL, winning an award or breaking album records. Others, they post photos and videos; one, in particular, was the inspiring speech completed in the 2018 United Nation. But mostly, the admins collect the photos from BTS official Twitter and/or Instagram account. Not limited to only admins, each individual in the fan page community can contribute by posting relevant information about BTS or by posting their artworks. Yet, the main occurrence of posting was done by ‘copy-paste’ from the Twitter post. It’s somehow easier to re-post an existing post, especially if the post resulted in many comments.

Similarly to the case of re-posting from Twitter, it’s very common to seek for a Twitter post in Instagram fan account. An app mainly for posting pictures (of the moment) and sharing them, an Instagram algorithm is very straightforward. Posting whatever they want comes with mostly staged images makes a straightforward relation to the context of content exposure posted by KPOP fans. Using existing posts from Twitter is easier to work with as they can expose more likes. However, this doesn’t imply staged posts brings benefit to only fan accounts as others who look through the post are notified with the recent discussion. The reason differs; some individuals not necessarily have an account on Twitter, so they rely on Instagram post updates and some use Instagram as a ‘runaway’ platform since they see Twitter as the main source of ongoing ‘fanwars’. Instagram users are more tolerant in regards to accepting disagreements and dislikes of other comments and their comments are more universal (without downgrading other artists). Apart from that, the fact they use hashtags (e.g. #BTS, #btsmemes, #btsfanarts, #[name of member]) as the concept of power creates the sense that this particular post will be exposed more and eventually gain more likes. Tailoring its algorithm, hashtag is a clever movement to consider and evaluate how useful the content is to their user before appearing on their feed. They are capable to process their production and publishing on phone; without pre and post-production of other film platforms. However, noticing the huge shift of viewing content allocate by Instagram, the less we see posts from friends, family or popular feeds that we’re accustomed to. Furthermore, having an affordance constraint in length and content, this app limits the length of a video to 60 seconds, which hinders the video’s meaning as a whole.

Twitter has become the recent hot topic that shares many stories regarding its relation to ARMY fandom. Firstly, Twitter’s algorithm work by ‘timeline highlights’ that appears on the top tweets after reopening the app. With this, Twitter began to use the same algorithm that powered ‘while you were away’ feeds to reorder the user’s timeline. Ideally, the tweets will appear based on the accounts they interact and follow. However, there is the chance that user might see a tweet from an account they don’t follow because of ‘Engagement’. They connect the engagement based on location, advertisements and network interaction. Thus, we sometimes see unrelated tweets appearing in our timeline. On the other hand, the suggested content is powered by a variety of signals where users can reply, retweet or like (fave). Twitter trends are featured by events and topics that users might be interested in, but can also be trends that you’ve curated. With the design that’s not to simply measure popularity, but design to capture topics that are “enjoying surge in popularity, rising distinctly about the normal level of chatter” (Gillespie 2011), showcase the behaviour of putting power over the fandom. For example, trending topics worldwide like #btspavedtheway, #givesour10millionback, demonstrate that ARMY fandom take competitions seriously, which may result in a different ending. If they see a flaw, they would immediately report the wrongdoings. But this also rose how they can take the case further by conversing directly with official accounts like YouTube and Spotify. Twitter issue-response hashtags can be seen as affordances for momentary connectedness (Rathnayake and Suthers, 2018). Displaying the broad and vague audience dimensions, this concept actually provides a basic foundation for online expression.

In another case, a recent case study was appointed to Billboard Top Social Artist nomination. Being nominated three times and winning two consecutive years (2017 & 2018), fans should be happy with the exposure. Nominating another two KPOP groups: EXO and GOT7, ARMY immediately contradict with the nomination nominees. ARMY compared those groups achievement with their own, applying that because BTS paved the way, they are nominated and compared the fact there’s another group who’s more deserving of the nomination. This raised the controversial topic of “why the BTS ARMY seems so toxic”.

Discussion: 

Working Within the BTS Fandom

At first glance, we don’t really understood how fandom actually works. Looking based on the idols, raising the awareness motto ‘Love Yourself’, the public will assume BTS fandom to think thoroughly like BTS. They assume the fans acts by giving the impression of appreciating self. It wasn’t the case for every individual as raising the concept of the black box becomes visible, as the fandom engagements tend to issue negative outcomes. Setting to embrace platforms in varying ways, script entirely different behaviour.

ARMY vs. Twitter

Scripting different behaviour in different platforms, issues and controversies that appear regulate mostly in Twitter. Communicating holds power, and as of now BTS hold the biggest population of fandom community, so tweeting especially accounts with big followers will significantly affect other individuals. Critically thinking, accessing the reliability and validity of Twitter tweets, tweets that are small in size, public by default, numerous and topically diverse provide a reminder that if the tweet receives a lot ‘like’ and ‘retweet’, automatically you will see what’s been happening surrounding the user’s bubble. Ideally, this scenario caters a connection in where human and technology are required to monitor and manage their timeline highlights, clean and categorise new tweets. Thus, it’s up to each individual (fan) to grasp and maintain accessing tweets that may trigger the behaviour. On the other hand, exploring Twitter’s black box algorithm that stated how it is obscured from view and closed from the enquiry, the chance to open the black box leads to another perspective. The process where Twitter will drop and fail, the device will lose power and the screen will limit its legibility and readability (Driscoll & Walker 2014, p. 252) actually help provide the complex network of how human (fans) and technology are acting visible to open the black box that ‘affordance’ obfuscates.

ARMY vs. Other Stans

The heated debate starts because the toxic ARMY tends to focus and respond to another group fandom whenever they felt threatened by their achievement that allure the media. Focusing too much on others rather than focusing on their own group frustrate other fandoms. It’s because instead of leaving appreciation, most ARMY search fault in others as part of their daily routine. Downgrading and trash talks other groups tend to appear frequently because they believe that since BTS is now the popular demand in Western eyes, KPOP must be centralised on them.

Investing the likelihood that new ARMYs are only exposed to information they want to see and enjoyed due to the algorithms, construct how they are rooted within a filter bubble. Hence, it creates the idea that they will never escape the bubble and never gain any exposure outside of that bubble. And this leads to the perception that most ARMYs are close-minded individuals since they don’t want to accept new information in the progressing reality.

Conclusion

Enjoying KPOP through different platforms constitute a meaningful cultural economy that involves users engagement and participation. Facilitating the basis that technological affordances of social media and fans participation interplay with each other, enhance the exposure of KPOP to the world. Focusing on the BTS ARMY as the case study, we can achieve the idea base of the black box concept. Providing us with an insight into decision and actions that the use of mainstreaming technology, the structure starts ‘with a solution rather than a problem’.

Furthermore, setting different purposes showed by the same fandom conclude how each platform differs from each other and how the conversation cycle appoints to the conclusion that Twitter holds the most toxicity. Instagram and Facebook don’t appeal much towards the negative debates because they see the platforms as promotion to express oneself. The platforms encourage users not to hate and bully, and to respect everyone’s privacy and opinions. Hence, this discussion uncover that the concept of ‘Black Box’ is somewhat alarming, because what stays hidden inside the platform bubble is different from the overall image that was shown to the public.