Affective Participation From the In-Between: The Platformization of K-Pop Fandom

Abstract

As K-pop fans around the world participate in their fan communities in hybrid online-offline contexts, their sense of connection with artists and one another is shaped by their unique position in-between co-creators and resistors within the platform ecosystem. This article draws upon 10 months of fieldwork from 2022 to 2023 to offer a framework for how fans navigate platformization and offers a theoretical contribution to platform studies by advancing the theory of affective participation from the in-between. As a process, platformization involves the shifting of everyday experiences from offline interaction to technologically mediated interaction. For K-pop fans, platform infrastructures change participation in the realm of quantification and identification. This project delves into the relationship between K-pop fans and power structures within this contemporary capitalist system. I argue that, although fans work to creatively subvert systems of power within platformization, through navigation practices such as gatekeeping insider knowledge, community policing, and self-cooptation, they reinvent community structuring systems that serve to benefit K-pop industry leaders and platform owners. However, their creative platform use illuminates a potential for affective participation in the in-between—simultaneously subverting and supporting industry expectations. Fans’ unique relationship with industry leaders and one another demonstrate the contradictory textured affective sensations which allow them to participate in fandom in unique ways. By offering this textured approach to affective participation, this article provides meaningful footing for future research on contemporary participation in global platformized contexts.

In early October 2024, it was nearly impossible for a Korean pop music (hereafter, K-pop) fan to use social media without hearing about the scandal surrounding Seunghan, a previous member of the still-fresh Korean boyband RIIZE. After controversial social media posts from the artist’s youth were unearthed, the K-pop group’s production company placed him on a hiatus, announced his return a year later, then reversed their decision in less than two days after a maelstrom of fan-led digital and in-person campaigns both in support of and boycotting the artist (Benjamin, 2024). What made this scandal ubiquitous in fandom conversation during this period of time was the relationship between the artist’s management company, the fans themselves, and the digital platforms they used to communicate. In this case, fans had varied amounts of influence in the management company’s decision depending on their method of participation. Fans quickly began to blame one another for their actions of support or protest, regardless of their opinion on the management company’s decision. This project thus seeks to understand what drives the contradictory practices of fan participation within platform infrastructures.

This article draws upon 10 months of fieldwork from 2022 to 2023 to offer a framework for how fans navigate the process of platformization in which they find themselves subject to datafication and quantification. As a process, platformization involves the move of everyday experiences from offline interaction to technologically mediated interaction. For K-pop fans, participation in fan activities means operating within communicative platform infrastructures. This project delves into the detailed ways that K-pop fans navigate this structure in creative and contradictory ways. I argue that K-pop fan participatory culture demonstrates a form of affective participation in the in-between which solidifies fans’ contradictory role wherein they are beholden to dual responsibility to their community as both consumers and creators.

Although fans work to creatively subvert systems of power within platform ecosystems, through navigations such as gatekeeping insider knowledge, community policing, and self-cooptation, they reinvent community structuring systems that serve to benefit K-pop industry leaders. However, their creative platform use illuminates a potential for participating in ways that simultaneously subvert and support industry expectations. The contradictory practices fans demonstrate while navigating platform capitalism solidify their position in-between systems of power and decentralized effort. Fans’ in-between positionality shapes their relationship to structures of power, providing a textured fan experience built on contradiction.

First, I place K-pop fans in a unique position where the platform is the infrastructure, as actors who simultaneously create and are constrained by their role in the system. Then I illustrate how fans navigate this role through the processes of enculturation, regulation, and commodification. After demonstrating the contradictory ways fans navigate the platform ecosystem, I argue that fans face affective encounters that solidify their unique relationship to power structures in which fans reify expectations and norms for behavior while engaging in subtly subversive tactics. I conclude with the claim that, while fan tactics serve to support platform owners despite fans’ best efforts, their creative navigations and affective encounters via fan made networks demonstrate the possibility for loose collective participation from the in-between, as fans recognize their unique position and dual responsibilities within platform infrastructures. Recognizing affective participating in the in-between provides meaningful groundwork to understand other contemporary participatory cultures in an era of platformization.

Theoretical background: platformization and fandom participation

Media studies, fan studies, and platform studies have accounted for participation in an age of platformization. Platformization is, “The penetration of infrastructures, economic processes, and governmental frameworks of digital platforms in different economic sectors and spheres of life, as well as the reorganization of cultural practices and imaginations around these platforms” (Poell et al., 2019). At its core, platformization refers to the broad shift in global business practices from direct business-to-consumer lines of communication to communication mediated through an online platform, with hopes to gather more data from consumers in the process (Srnicek, 2016, 2017).

Scholars no longer assume neutrality in the process of platformization, citing the intensity of platform data collection, or datafication, on their users (Couldry & Mejias, 2019; Grover et al., 2025). Srnicek (2017) argues that the system of platform capitalism is one in which platform owners race for control over the technology-mediated communication activity, and thus the data, of users. Those who control user communication platforms, then, control the platform economy. In the case of K-pop, specifically, Korean cultural wave (Hereafter, Hallyu [한류]) scholars argue that the Korean cultural industry is now reliant on international digital media platforms (Jin et al., 2023) and work to expand the industry’s popularity through promotion of K-pop content on Korean-hosted platforms (Park et al., 2023). As international K-pop fans act both as the consumers of this content and its creators, this article took up the question framed in Nielborg et al.’s (2023) special collection Studying Platforms and Cultural Production: “How exactly will an increase in platform-dependency impact cultural producers?” (p. 2).

Media convergence and fan labor

K-pop fans are actors who simultaneously cultivate their own roles and are constrained by their assumed roles in the process of platformization. Fan studies texts emphasized the shift from fans as consumers (Fraade-Blanar & Glazer, 2017) to prosumers (Jenkins, 2013; Scott, 2019; Toffler, 1980), that is, fans who now had a say in the production of their object of fandom. This shift was made possible by fan practices within their own communities of, production, creation, promotion, and diffusion across media platforms (Bourdaa, 2016; Derbaix et al., 2023; Wang, 2020). The extent to which fans were considered to be involved in co-production of the art, films, series, genres, or other objects of media fandom related to the process of media convergence (Jenkins, 2006). At its core, Jenkins (2006) states, “Convergence occurs within the brains of individual consumers and through their social interactions with others” (p. 3). To put it simply, fans cross physical and virtual boundaries to find others to connect with about their fandom.

Media convergence changed the fan experience and fan participatory culture. Namely, the connection between fandom as a subject to the powerful media creator has shifted to one that, while at times multidirectional, is still disproportionate. Fans are still subjected to algorithmic bias and media effects. Scholarship on fan studies and K-pop fandom specifically has argued that much of the K-pop industry’s international success is due to its impressive digital media ecosystem that engages with a global audience (Bayoumi, 2022; Kim, 2021; Lee, 2019). However, research from this position also supports that the media convergence fans engage in due to the K-pop industry’s digital presence has exacerbated intercultural issues (Jin et al., 2023; D. C. Oh, 2017, 2024) and the datafication of fan labor (Caliandro et al., 2024; Sun et al., 2022).

K-pop fans continue to demonstrate on-the-ground collective effort to cultivate their own participatory culture within the system of platform capitalism. Over the last decade, K-pop fans have come together for causes they care about, whether crafting a movement to save the environment (Yi, 2021), raising money for COVID-19 relief in India (Tusing, 2021) or orchestrating presidential campaign efforts in Chile (Youn, 2023), Indonesia (Tarigan, 2024), and the Philippines (Garcia & Pontejos, 2022; Romero, 2022). Fans honed these skills through more traditional fan practices such as donating to rent out billboards in Times Square (Herman, 2017) and central Seoul (Yim, 2018) to celebrate artists’ birthdays and anniversaries, selling out merchandise (Wee & Patrick, 2024) and competitively “streaming” new music (McIntyre, 2021). As dual consumers and cultural producers, K-pop fans engage with a standard of expected fan labor. While study participants disagreed about the source of those expectations, the affective force of varied expectations drove contradictory individual actions and collective efforts.

Affective participation and the “in-between”

Affect is the second variable taken into consideration for this analysis. Affect has been defined as an undercurrent of sensation that permeates our experiences (Ashcraft, 2020) and a “force or forces of encounter” (Gregg & Siegworth, 2010, p. 2). In colloquial terms, I liken affect to a “vibe,” the often-unnamed collective sensation in an environment. For example, imagine attending a concert in a large stadium venue. One is likely to recognize if we enter a space and the “vibes are off,” even if no other name can be offered for the sensation. We are less likely to recognize when everything is running smoothly and the atmosphere is comfortable, if recognized at all, until after the fact. In a stadium concert, affect can be sensed in the shared anticipation that permeates through a crowd, unspoken or otherwise. In this way, one can see affect as a force that is atmospheric (Ahmed, 2004; Berlant, 2011; Massumi, 1995), sensory (Sedgwick, 2003; Soler, 2016), and transmissible (Ashcraft, 2017; Stewart, 2007).

In this K-pop fandom context, individual fans sense the platformization of their experience across relationships with one another, the relationship between fans and the actors in the K-pop industry, the relationship between fans and popular opinion surrounding K-pop fandom, and, most notably, fissures in each of those relationships. Stewart (2007) argued that affect was best recognized as breaks in the ordinary in which sensations are recognized and power “snaps into place” (p. 47). Applying an understanding of affect to this context then provides a deeper understanding of how moments of connection and disconnection in fan relationships shape their participation in the platform infrastructures.

Affective forces permeate through interaction and collective anticipation, thus driving such sensations through K-pop fans’ in-between positionality. Fans of K-pop music are inherently beholden to capitalism, as the K-pop industry is designed, like other media industries, to earn capital through fan attention and affection. However, as described above, K-pop fandom has followed in the footsteps of other media fandoms to cultivate communities from their passion. What makes this participatory culture unique is ongoing awareness of this positionality and its nuanced effects. For example, Sun et al. (2022) found that fans of K-pop girl groups were aware of their commodification of surface-level “feminist” performances yet used them as a point from which to engage in discourse about the need for feminist values in international K-pop fandom.

In organizational design scholarship, a planner must step into an “in-between” space where they must, “entangle [one]self into this space while being ‘crafted’ by it, as well as ‘crafting’ it” (Akama & Prendiville, 2013, p. 32). As K-pop fans are thrust into that in-between position, they are more likely to experience a social tug-of-war between their creator and consumer identities. In this way, contemporary fans act as dual insider-outsiders in their fan communities and face pressure to perform fandom in specific ways (Dwyer & Buckle, 2009; Milligan, 2014; Mullings, 1999). By engaging from their position in-between, fans oscillate between wielding power and having it stripped away from them (Merriam et al., 2001). This project builds upon work like that of Niati (2024), which posits that engaging from the in-between is layered and frustrating but vital to effectively reflecting reality, with the addition of considering affect. Rather than simple recognition of their positionality in-between creator and consumer, investigating affect allows for seeing the space where fan participation occurs from the nooks and crannies of structures of power.

Thus, I define the term affective participation as it is used in the project to understand fans’ position in-between powerful and powerless within the broader system of platform capitalism. More than an emotional connection to an idea that drives action, affective participation refers to the collective sensations that permeate participatory communities, such as K-pop fandom, within broader systems. Similar to concepts of networked affect (Hillis et al., 2015) which describe affect’s digital permeance and space-making properties (Aziz, 2022), affective participation involves both the inclusion and exclusion of certain sensations across hybrid communities. Alternatively, scholars such as Smets (2019) describe affect’s quality of immobility, stating, “We can also understand affective use of ICTs [information and communication technologies] as a sensory engagement that is immobile, retracted and disconnected” (p. 654). I argue in this article that affect acts in both of these directions, as a force through which fans experience positive inclusive and negative isolating sensations that shape their participatory culture. To understand both the way fans navigate the system of platform capitalism as well as the implications from those navigations on affective participation, I ask the following exploratory and theoretical research questions:

• RQ1: How do K-pop fans navigate the system of platform capitalism?

• RQ2: What do these navigations demonstrate about affective participation and power?

Methodology

To answer the above descriptive and theoretical research questions, I drew upon data from a large multi-phase study with the aim of understanding the organizational dynamics of K-pop fan participatory culture. While the broader study involved fieldwork in the United States, this article focuses specifically on data from 10 months of ethnographic fieldwork of K-pop fan participatory culture in Seoul, South Korea. This portion of data collection would not have been possible without the support of a Fulbright research grant from the Korean American Educational Commission. With their support, I first built a connection with Seoul National University’s Hallyu Research Center, where I participated in academic conferences related to the Korean cultural wave, gained access to certain participant populations, and met research assistants. Beyond the support of these formal connections, most of my data collection was done in tandem with the informal fan connections I made through social media platforms, in-person interactions, and snowball sampling.

Markham and Baym’s (2008) internet Inquiry, Przybylski’s (2020) Hybrid Ethnography, and Tracy’s (2019) Qualitative Research Methods were used to inform the method for the study across contexts. The ethnographic portion of the study took a critical ethnographic approach, aimed at moving beyond the tradition of “. . . Cultural description and analysis that displays meanings by interpreting meanings” (Thomas, 1993, p. 4) and focused instead on speaking on behalf of informants and participants to a broader audience to give the participants more voice. This research consisted of participant observation and “deep hanging out” (Geertz, 1973) with my informants, K-pop fans in distinct contexts, with the intended goal of resisting the “silly fangirl” stereotype in lieu of the expert communicators these fans seemed to be.

Hybrid ethnographic data collection

K-pop fan communities are affective networks that burst into being around certain calls to action and then simmer back down into a combination of social media algorithms and shared interests in an object of fandom. Thus, K-pop fan participatory culture does not have one site to study, but rather a series of events to follow. Ganesh and Wang (2015) described this eventful view of organizations, stating, “Unlike objects, events, therefore, are a substantially different kind of existence, which have neither mass nor volume and are not containable or storable” (p. 7). To study these difficult-to-grasp events, I followed the creation and promotion of fan events both in person and online within a range of varying sites. Fans acted almost everywhere, and therefore my research attempted to meet them where they were, including in person as well as in virtual spaces of interaction and sites of communication.

K-pop fan events in Korea included visiting K-pop stores, fan-led pop-up events, official fan meeting events with idols, concerts, academic conferences focused on fandom effects and other more casual fan interactions within K-pop-adjacent settings. In line with calls to study participants wherever they interact in hybrid contexts (boyd, 2017; Caliandro, 2018), my “site of study” included a variety of spaces fans used to talk about K-pop and plan events (King-O’Riain, 2021). Seoul, specifically, has become a site of pilgrimage for K-pop fans (Y. J. Oh, 2018, 2023), and many event spaces catered to that specific tourist industry, shaping hybrid event organizing.

Virtual spaces for data collection included international social media sites like Facebook and Twitter/X as well as Korean-centric social media platforms, such as Naver and KakaoTalk (Yim, 2021). While living in Korea, global sites’ algorithms also changed based on my access through a Korean IP address, registering for a Korean phone plan, and switching my smartphone’s app store to purchase the Korean version of phone applications. To grasp the themes that mattered to the research questions asked in this project, I narrowed my focus within virtual sites to communicative interactions surrounding the planning of hybrid, virtual, or in person events within the fan community. The vignettes used below to describe fan navigation techniques speak to a hybrid online-offline sensibility rather than one or the other. In total, I observed over 100 discreet “events” that included about 400 hours of observation. Data from these events included field notes, photos, videos, audio recordings, and material artifacts.

Analysis and reflexivity

Once data were collected, I analyzed field notes and other artifacts from the hybrid ethnography using iterative analysis (Tracy, 2019) and thematic analysis (Corbin & Strauss, 2014) to ensure this variety of sources and data gathering techniques yielded an accurate representation of the fan community. I also placed extra emphasis on multimodal data collection, taking photos, video recordings, and voice notes as well as collecting physical artifacts such as paper goods and crafts throughout the fieldnote process to support that my findings aligned with evidence.

Principles of critical ethnography drove reflexivity in this and all phases of the project. I also considered how my own values might color the analysis and engaged in data immersion via ongoing conversations with scholars, peers, and friends about emerging themes in the analysis process. This part of the data immersion process worked to organize my thoughts and theorizing and at times brought me back to reality outside of the community in which I was immersed. Alongside formal data collection events in Korea, I also participated in multiple academic conferences throughout the analysis and writing phase centered on the intersection of Hallyu studies, fan studies, media studies, and K-pop’s effects across international contexts. Throughout the analysis process, I paid special attention to my multiple positionalities as both a researcher and participant in the fan spaces I occupied. I especially reflected on my position as a foreign scholar invested in learning more about K-pop fans in a Korean context.

Therefore, a large portion in the analysis phase of this project was the ongoing process of reflexivity. As a self-identified aca-fan (Jenkins, 2013), I sat at the intersection of participant and researcher in this field site. My passion as a fan initiated my interest in this project, a position that both gave me privileged access and insider knowledge of the site and required hyper-reflexivity of my role in the fandom. Furthermore, my identity as a White American woman and researcher meant the importance of co-creating knowledge with my participants was especially vital. I also engaged in meaningful member checks (Tracy, 2019) throughout my ethnographic data collection process, asking participants how they felt about my ongoing findings. At the end of my Fulbright fellowship year, I led a small workshop about my methods and findings and multiple participants in my project as well as members of K-pop fan participatory culture in Korea attended. I asked those attendees explicitly, “How well do these findings resonate with your experience?” and took their responses, which included mostly comments directed at providing more specificity about unique fan identities, to heart.

Findings: K-pop fans’ contradictory navigations of platformization

In this section I answer RQ1: How do K-pop fans navigate the system of platform capitalism? Of note is assumptions of power in this part of the project. Many participants described the production companies who manage and promote K-pop groups to be some of the most important “bad guys” that make up the infrastructure surrounding K-pop fan culture. Other structures of power, such as the system of platform capitalism, are enacted by platform owners, state governments, and media outlets. Fan studies scholars and Hallyu scholars, in particular, are concerned about the platformization of fan activities as a means of transforming fan leisure activities into quantifiable and commodifiable data (Jin et al., 2013; Rayna & Stiukova, 2021).

Through fieldwork, I found fans navigate the process of platformization in contradictory ways. Throughout those navigations, fans also engaged in affective encounters as individual goals bumped up against the desires of one another, societal expectations, and norms of general society. In the following sections, I describe the ways fans navigate specific processes of platformization. Then I discuss how affective forces that drive those navigations. Table 1: Typology for Platformization of Fan Participatory Culture demonstrates the processes of enculturation, regulation, and commodification, the contradictory way fans navigate those processes, and the affective forces involved.

Table 1.

Typology for Platformization of Fan Participatory Culture.

Process	Contradictory navigations	Affective force
Enculturation	Fans build information-sharing networks/weaponize knowledge	Pressure to prove membership leads to gatekeeping
Regulation	Fans challenge official rules/create and uphold fandom rules	Desire to gain cultural currency leads to fandom policing
Commodification	Fans build subversive economies/ support traditional ones	Sense of protection/duty leads to cooptation

Enculturation

First, fans are enculturated into fandom expectations that change due to the process of platformization, in which communication-mediating platforms both construct and constrain fandom knowledge systems and informal communication systems. Enculturation, that is, the learning of cultural context, historical content and tradition, is inherently tied to power when mediated through platforms and the internet. Platformization, “Shapes and reshapes cultural intention and knowledge diffusion” (Chaudhuri et al., 2022, p. 369).

In the case of K-pop fandom, enculturation refers to the process of acquisition of broader fan community norms, expectations, and rules. The enculturation process surrounding international K-pop fandom is complicated by broader cultural context and the ever-changing platform infrastructures. As fans learn how to be a platformized fan according to other fans, they interact with one another and rely on broader systems of information sharing, mediated through emerging communication platforms. The way fans navigate these interactions demonstrates how platformization both constructs and constrains fan knowledge systems.

Fans navigate platformization to construct information networks

In my fieldwork, I found that, on the one hand, fans used communication platforms to build communities of practice and share information. If I had not created a network of English-speaking K-pop fan friends, for example, I would have faced extra difficulties while navigating the K-pop fan experience in Korea. I use a vignette from fieldwork to illustrate the value of this network. One of the K-pop fan events that initially caught my attention as a fan living outside of Korea were music shows (Kelley, 2017). Each of South Korea’s major broadcast networks hosts their own weekly variety music show, where idol groups perform new music and fans cast votes through different methods to rank the most popular recent song release. The system for fan participation in music show audiences has changed drastically throughout the K-pop industry’s thirty-year history, and learning current techniques for audience member application and attempted participation required me to rely heavily on guidance from other fans.

In most cases, the small network of K-pop fans I built with established expertise on being a fan in Korea proved invaluable to my learning the ins and outs of the application process. English-speaking, mostly western friends and interviewees told stories of past audience application experiences, such as lining up overnight in front of a recording studio with only word-of-mouth confirmation of entry from other fans who were also competing for the same limited number of spots, or completing a fan-created scavenger hunt to find a piece of paper posted somewhere around a venue and texting a photo to fan club leaders in sequential order to secure their spot. They also taught me the contemporary steps for applying for music show recordings during my fieldwork period, a convoluted process based on a now-defunct platform owned by one of the major K-pop production companies. Figures 1 and 2 illustrate the digital application platform as well as the manual check-in process. As the process for participation in K-pop fan culture rapidly shifts under platformization, fans rely on informal communication networks to learn and continuously relearn best techniques. However, while fans often worked within the dynamics of platform-mediated communication to build informal communication networks, others used the properties of various platforms to gatekeep their knowledge and maintain control.

Figure 1.

Digital application process.

Figure 2.

Manual check-in process.

Fans navigate platformization to weaponize knowledge

On the other hand, the social platforms used to build fan networks also constrained learning. To purchase and pick up tickets for a K-pop concert as a non-Korean national, knowledge of both internationally common mobile technologies and local platform knowledge was required. Throughout the year that I completed this participant ethnography, many K-pop groups had paid “Official Fanclub communities” where fans subscribed for early access to purchase concert tickets. For most K-pop concerts in Seoul, unless a fan was a member of the Official Fanclub, they would not be able to get a ticket before the show sold out. Registering the Official Fanclub account also ensured that each fan only bought one ticket, which limited reselling practices.

In practice, this local platform limitation meant that K-pop fans in Korea found creative ways to ensure they got a ticket to see their favorite idol. On the nights popular K-pop groups released presale for their concert tickets, fans joined the crowds in computer game cafes to make use of the fast WIFI or ethernet speeds and try to get first access to ticket sales. Underground economies of ticket resellers or those who offered to buy tickets under fans’ accounts as “proxies” also emerged as a result of ticket hosting platform constraints. Fans paid upward of $300 USD before ticket costs for proxies to log in and hopefully secure them a ticket. This underground practice was shamed in large fan communities but shared in secret from fan to trusted fan in their private conversations. In this way, fans gatekept their insider knowledge from one another.

Regulation

Fans also navigated regulations that proliferated in platformized culture in contradictory ways, following and reinforcing them but also subverting and challenging them. At the advent of the digital era, governments worried that the introduction of “cyberspace” would render regulations obsolete, as real-space regulations could not be enforced (Lessig, 2006). Contrary to that concern, platforms moderating communication in “cyberspace” quickly became regulatory agents in their own right (de Kloet et al., 2019), and platform owners now have regulatory abilities.

Regulation refers to control exerted over fans in the form of rules and explicit or implicit expectations from outside and inside forces. Both K-pop industry representatives and fans themselves regulate best practices via positive reinforcement of behavior that supports platform owner desires and negative consequences for rule infringement. Fans push the boundaries on what it means to be “good” fan in their interactions with other fans and the broader K-pop industry. Fan platform-mediated communication techniques across interactions demonstrate how they challenge some industry expectations while cultivating their own.

Fans navigate platformization to challenge industry expectations

On one hand, industry representatives uphold expectations and consequences. Platforms create expectations that reflect platform owners,’ in this case, K-pop industry leaders,’ desires and discipline those who fail to meet expectations with datafied consequences. K-pop production companies used platform elements to enforce expectations while fans use those same elements to challenge them. Some fans, however, walk the line between “good” and “bad” fans in the eyes of production companies in their quest for social status within fandom. Production companies prohibited filming across multiple venues and events, a rule either strictly enforced or seemingly ignored, depending on the event type. Staff announced instructions in Korean to turn off cell phones and put cameras away before shows began. In some cases, event staff ignored filming during the performance one day then strictly prohibited the practice on others. Strict days coincided with live events for which K-pop corporations sold either livestream tickets or post-event recordings to fans who could not attend the event. Prohibiting filming meant that event staff, usually a mix of young Korean women in uniform vests and men and women in bodyguard attire, gave fans caught using cameras or phones to record two warnings before removing them from their seat and asking them to delete footage and leave the venue. I saw these fans, often, but not exclusively, other young Asian women, dragged from event venues carrying oversized professional cameras and complaining to staff that they did not understand the instructions in Korean or were being treated unfairly.

Despite the fluctuating intensity of repercussions for filming during a live performance, fans found creative and risky ways to film their favorite idols. The culture surrounding fan recorded non-professional camera content (“Fancams,” or “직캠 [jjikcam],” a shortened version of the phrase 직접 카메라 [jikjjop camera] to mean direct filming in Korean) involves filming and consuming high-quality videos and photos of idols from proximity during their live appearances and performances. Fancams are usually close-up shots of one idol in a group and highlight the elements in performances that specifically highlight that idol. After attending these events in person, fans would pile onto trains to go and scour the internet for better quality videos of the concert they just saw live, giggling and joking about the events they just witnessed with their friends in the previously silent train car. Due to the popularity of fancams, the fans who produced high quality photos and videos gained social power within their own fan collectives in the form of unrecognized cultural currency (Lo, 2015) and used branded watermarks over their images to prove their ownership of the content. These fans, called “fansites,” acted as de-facto influencers in their online fan networks and became well known within their network via their proximity to their favorite idols. K-pop fandom’s content-hungry culture has also created space for for-profit-fans to attend events and take high quality photos of idols they are not interested in to sell their content to other fansites. However, fansites often traded images of other idols they were less interested in for those they are passionate about supporting. Fansites saw their role in fandom like a job, and other fans view them as important members of the fan community. The risk of repercussion was worth the payoff from other fans.

Fans navigate platformization to cultivate fandom regulations

However, fans also created their own systems of control within the broader infrastructure of platformized participatory fandom. Fans created their own set of expectations and peer-to-peer consequences for platform-based participation as well. For example, many fans contested the job-like role of a fansite, claiming this practice was much more nefarious, toeing the line between fansite and “sasaeng” [사생]. A Korean term stemming from the phrase for “private life” [사생활], fans charged these self-proclaimed fansites who filmed idols outside of their officially scheduled events with stalking. Fans scolded one another for sharing or liking photos on Twitter/X taken by fansites accused by others of sasaeng behavior.

In another example, fan club leaders, often, but not always, other young Korean women who were fans of the same group, oversaw organizing fans into an orderly line for entering specific events with predesignated registration. At a designated time, leaders checked each fan’s identity one-at-a time by certifying that the publicly visible list of accepted names on the platform matched each fan’s government-issued identification card. Next to each name on the list was the last two digits of the phone number used to apply. Fan club leaders confirmed that number was registered to the correct fan by asking everyone to show their Fan Club Membership page in the phone application then switch to the system settings to display their phone number. Fan club leaders also asked each fan in line to bring a physical copy of the most recent album from the group performing that day, with the CD included, presumably to demonstrate fan dedication and drive physical album sales, as those count toward weekly new release popularity competitions. Finally, fans were asked to bring the group’s official lightstick, remove all stickers or decorations that might distract from the cohesion of the audience during recording, and put new batteries in the tool in front of the fan club leader to demonstrate that the fandom’s official symbol would be visible and bright in the crowd. In this way, fans constructed their own regulations to match industry leaders.

Commodification

Finally, fans navigate the commodification of K-pop fandom. One of the societal effects of platformization on society is the commodification, “. . . of all social relations by collecting, algorithmically processing, circulating, and selling user data” (de Kloet et al., 2019, p. 249). Commodification places the burden of blame on the user, wherein their election to use apps which now mediate most communication practices indicates their willingness to share personal data with platform owners (Couldry & Mejias, 2019; Fuchs, 2017).

Participatory fan culture exists in relation to a specific part of the platformization process in which media production conglomerates aim to make a profit from fan support, and thus fans navigate their role in the K-pop economy in contradictory and creative ways. Platforms enable underground fan economies to form seemingly in counter to, but often also in support of, industry-led official fan economies. Fans used their networks online through social media platforms like Twitter/X and Instagram to orchestrate an underground economy that runs either parallel or in contrast to production companies.

Fans navigate platformization to construct subversive economies

Primarily, fans created vast networks of international buying and trading official K-pop merchandise beyond official streams. For example, fans cultivated an underground trading economy for another popular commodity across K-pop fan collectives: Photocards. Photocards (in Korean, 포토카드 [Photocard] or 포카 [Poca]) are small trading-card sized pieces of cardboard with exclusive selfie (in Korean, 셀카 [Selca], short for 셀프 카메라 [Self Camera]) photos taken by idols, usually while backstage of the photoshoots for the album cover art. A large driver for the contemporary success of physical albums sales in the K-pop industry, the official photocard was popularized in Girl’s Generation’s (In Korean, 소녀시대 [Seonyeo Shidae] or SNSD) 2010 Album “Oh!,” when digital album sales were taking off and Korean manufacturers wanted to maintain physical album popularity. Contemporarily, photocards play a large role in fandom trading networks and shape some of the informal value systems placed on specific members of K-pop groups, demonstrated through fan economies. Now, I explain how fans navigate the process of commodification through photocard trading and selling.

I found that at every K-pop event I attended, official or unofficial, fans were trading or selling cards. I attended multiple pop-up stores surrounding new album releases, or sometimes simply new merchandise lines, and fans frequently used these spaces to create photocard selling/trading marketplaces. The first time I saw a fan trading marketplace I was too intimidated to participate. Young women, mostly Asian, sat in small circles on the ground with blankets or scarves laid in front of them, displaying their wares—in this case, photocards. Many chanted what they were looking for in Korean or placed handwritten signs and scrolling messages on their phones with phrases like, “Sell: (in Korean, 판매 [Panmae])” and “Trade: (In Korean, 교환 [Gyohwan]; also meaning to exchange)” then a specific group member’s name. I learned the phrase, “Who are you looking for? (In Korean, 누구 찾으세요? [Nugu chajeuseyo?])” and found that helpful to navigate the sprawling crowded marketplace. Figure 3 is a photo of one such informal trading market.

Figure 3.

Informal photocard trading market.

Fans navigate platformization to reify traditional fan economies

Some fan subversion techniques, however, had the opposite outcome. In another example, the fan trading economy around K-pop photocards highlighted how seemingly subversive fan actions instead reified capitalist industry standards. The extensive photocard trading economy, which takes place not just during in person events but also through online networks and across social media accounts, birthed a new buying and trading platform that grew in popularity during my time doing fieldwork. While fans used both internationally and locally popular social media platforms, they also created their own digital platforms to share content, advertise events, make money, and cultivate collective opinions outside of the platforms offered to them by the K-pop production companies (BTSRoad, 2023; HotDuk, 2022; Infludeo, 2021). The most popular photocard-trading-specific platform is Pocamarket, branded as, “The marketplace for K-pop photocards” (Infludeo, 2021). This platform shifted management while I was collecting data and has since began to expand its reach to the United States and other foreign markets. In Seoul, during the time of data collection, I could package up a stack of cards I wanted to sell and either mail them to a warehouse office or drop them off at participating locations. Once submitted, the cards were reviewed for quality and either listed under my account online or returned to me. This process took between a week and two months during their peak restructuring period. I was shocked by how accurate the marketplace’s management team was at recognizing cards. Even without me telling them the event a card was from, they could accurately place the card, even if I collected it during an obscure fansign or popup event for a small-scale group. I was also shocked to see the stark contrast between prices of cards. This platform allowed for direct comparison between monetary value of certain members or rarity of cards. The cheapest I ever saw was 500 won (~$.50 USD) and the most expensive for a single card was a whopping 350,000 won (~$325 USD).

Study participants theorized in discussing this platform that it “had to” be run by fans due to its extensive understanding of fan culture and specific photocard sources. However, I saw a booth for the company at the annual KCON convention in Los Angeles, California, in August 2023, where cards were displayed notably not for sale to promote the international leg of the platform. Fans could buy cards internationally, but stock was more limited, prices were higher, and shipping costs were steep. Given that most of the industry is made up of managers, R&D staff, art directors, choreographers, and other employees that are frequently young women who identify as fans themselves, this platform may have been created by an industry insider with personal fandom insight. Thus, the creative subversion of official photocard purchasing was commodified.

Discussion: affective participation from the in-between

In this discussion, I focus specifically on RQ2: What do these navigations demonstrate about affective participation and power? Instead of assuming that all forms of platformized fan participation benefit platform owners, I take into consideration the reflexivity fans have about the influence of broader power structures in their experience. Driving the contradictory navigations of this system are a variety of affective sensations that apply pressure to fans to participate in fan practices in ways that hold themselves accountable for negative outcomes and assign praise to outside parties. While participants’ assumptions about the source of these affective sensations differs, the structure-reifying practices they engage in can be organized into three themes related to the contradictory processes of enculturation, regulation, and commodification. The affective forces that intersect with those processes lead to a textured form of affective participation built on contradiction. This contradiction builds upon above discussed literature on “in-betweenness” as a position on struggle and nuance, especially in relation to power dynamics (Merriam et al., 2001; Niati, 2024). Fans recognize their own contradictory role in the process of platformization and thus experience pressure to shape the ongoing process into one they agree with, attempt to dismantle the system, or accept that they are beholden to platformization’s datafication and quantification. Thus, rather than describing fans as prosumers (Jenkins, 2013; Scott, 2019) or communities built on media convergence (Jenkins, 2006), K-pop fans’ ability to navigate platform infrastructures with recognition of their dual identity demonstrates the affective potential to participate from the in-between.

Affective pressure to prove membership led to gatekeeping

When fans feel a sense of pressure to belong and prove their deservedness in the fan community, they gatekeep knowledge, creating informal knowledge-sharing systems and barriers to participation in those systems. The sensations of belonging, inclusion/exclusion, and a collective “FOMO” (the colloquial acronym for that “Fear of Missing Out”) drove fans’ desires to prove themselves as members of the in-group and ostracize those they perceived to be competing against. Fans both created systems for sharing knowledge, such as my friendships with fans who have years of experience being a fan in Korea, and weaponized that knowledge, such as gatekeeping “under-the-table” information.

While fans attempted to “craft” the process of platformization to build up an infrastructure they could support (Akama & Prendiville, 2013), their “entanglement” in the power structures involved lead to reifying specific existing broader power dynamics that gave voice to specific fans over others. These navigations further shifted the burden of care for fandom wellbeing from the platform owners and industry leaders who created the fandom and placed the burden for learning processes and rules back on the fans. Fans remain reflexive about these power dynamics, however, demonstrating how recognition of affect shapes a potential for in-between identity participation.

Affective desires for cultural currency led to fandom policing

Despite misgivings about the industry as a negative or controlling force, fans replicated and reified regulations about what it means to be a “good fan” then policed one another via mediated communication platforms. The sensations of jealousy, control, and competition that drove fans to desire cultural currency, whether in the form of inter-fandom popularity or proximity to idols, led fans to engage in navigation tactics like concertive control, peer pressure, and surveillance. Fan-led arguments claimed that industry expectations for fans were too extreme, and repercussions were too harsh, such as barring fans from participation for a missed event or dragging fans with cameras out of a venue. However, fans recreated their own systems of regulation and control for one another through tactics like online doxxing of privacy.

These policing practices demonstrate how, when participating in platformized fan culture from a position in-between, fans may reestablish a system on control even while critiquing and challenging the current process of platformization. The sensations of pride, contempt, confidence, and belonging that fans felt while following established fan expectations led to practices of othering, surveillance, and concertive control as fans policed themselves and walked the line between disregarding industry expectations and breaking fan-created rules.

Sensations of care led to self-cooptation

Finally, the sensations of love, support, duty, care, control, and protection that fans feel toward their favorite artists drove both subversive economic process navigations, such as underground photocard and merchandise selling networks, and industry promotional techniques, such as raising the value of official photocards through trading processes. Fans commodified themselves through these contradictory platform-mediated navigations, and the industry became accustomed to fans diligently participating in the popular culture economy despite any misgivings they had about the organizations in charge. This form of cooptation is integral to the K-pop industry’s success.

Self-cooptation therefore describes how, as fans participate from the in-between position of creator and consumer, they may accept that they are beholden to platformization’s datafication and quantification. Fans recognize their positions as dual insider-outsiders (Dwyer & Buckle, 2009; Milligan, 2014; Mullings, 1999) and thus simultaneously critique a system that they co-construct. Affective forces thus provide spaces for fans to recognize and participate within the crevices of their unique relationship to power structures shaped by platformization.

Affective participation from the in-between

Many fans are aware of the role they play in promoting the goals of the capitalist popular culture industry and therefore attempt to challenge the heads of K-pop production companies, often perceived to be evil, directly. It was not uncommon to see memes or fan-edited videos online of company headquarters burning down, rented protest trucks to challenge company decisions, and viral hashtags calling for better treatment of idols. Such was the case in the recent example of Seunghan, ex-member of K-pop group RIIZE, shared in the introduction to this article. Fan love of an idol or artist group drives a passionate desire to support and protect them, in contrast to the frustration fans feel toward their management company. Fans walked a line between wanting to support their favorite artist and growing frustration with the amount of money, effort, and time spent supporting the industry, demonstrating how their in-between identities influenced efforts.

K-pop fans often report feeling stigmatized for their overwhelming passion for the subject, which they claim overshadows that of other fandoms (King-O’Riain, 2021; D. C. Oh, 2017). Yet the “affective sensibility” that leads to emotional investment (Grossberg, 1992) includes both positive and negative affective sensations. Thus, fans’ affectively driven practices from a position as in-between those who support and subvert the system of platform capitalism demonstrate a contradictory form of participation. This form of affective participation builds upon conversations surrounding media convergence (Jenkins, 2006) and fan labor as it offers a new lens through which to understand contradictory actions in participatory cultures. Instead of contradictory affective sensations leading the fandom to dissolve or else submit to industry expectations for participation, the in-betweenness of contemporary K-pop fandom is made even stickier in its contradictory recognition of affective pressures and shared responsibility.

Conclusion and future directions

This project sought to understand the affective encounters that drive contradictory practices of fan participation within the process of platformization and with recognition of fans’ relationship to power. Although fans worked to creatively subvert systems of power from decentralized efforts, they reinvented systems of enculturation, regulation, and commodification that served to benefit K-pop industry leaders and recreate their own structures of enforcement. Through navigation techniques such as gatekeeping insider knowledge, community policing, and self-cooptation, fans demonstrated how, regardless of how each navigated their in-between identity, fans blamed certain negative outcomes on one another and not on broader systems of control.

The process of platformization as an infrastructure has shaped participatory K-pop fan culture by constructing a positionality in-between creator and consumer that affectively places responsibility on fans. As fans are unable to position themselves inside or outside the structure of platformization, they instead navigate the system using specific and contradictory practices. As such, even those efforts which seem most subversive may still support the industry overall.

However, by engaging in actions like building underground economies, new policies for best practice, and constructing information sharing networks, global K-pop fans cultivate a participatory fan culture that may offer the potential for participation in-between industry expectations of the fandom. In the middle ground spaces between official and fan made events, fans participate in creative ways that allow them to earn cultural currency within the fandom, often in forms that take the industry extra time to understand and emulate. They also create networks to share information that industry leaders attempt to keep hidden and cultivate their own systems of community maintenance beyond the limited support offered by K-pop management companies.

The affective forces flowing through K-pop fan participatory culture present implications for the effect of platformization on society. Primarily, the contradictory ways that fans navigate the processes of enculturation, regulation, and commodification within platformization demonstrates a textured form of participation hinged on the in-between positionality of fans. These contradictory navigations, and more specifically the outcomes of those navigations within a platform ecosystem, indicate we must take a closer look at affective forces in other participatory cultures who are beholden to sensations of responsibility and blame.

Future research should investigate the specific identities individual fans as well as collectives bring to contemporary media fandom spaces, and how those outside identities influence their in-between fan identities. More scholarship should also continue their efforts to understand K-pop fandom, specifically, as a site of transcultural identity shaping and an example of a contemporary participatory culture positioned in-between creator and consumer. Finally, future work should apply this understanding of the in-between as a site of complicated navigations and affective potential to other participatory cultures. Fans’ in-between identity, cultivated through contradictory navigations of platformization as infrastructure, demonstrate the potential for affective participation that challenges contemporary scholarly understandings of fans as prosumers and harbingers of media convergence. Affective participation from the in-between, then, may be the best lens to understand the experience of contemporary platformized participatory cultures.