Fandom, social media, and identity work: The emergence of virtual community through the pronoun “we”
- Authors
- Lee, S.H.; Tak, J.-Y.; Kwak, E.-J.; Lim, T.Y.
- Issue Date
- Oct-2020
- Publisher
- American Psychological Association
- Keywords
- computational text analysis; Facebook community; identity work; K-pop fandom; we-words
- Citation
- Psychology of Popular Media, v.9, no.4, pp 436 - 446
- Pages
- 11
- Journal Title
- Psychology of Popular Media
- Volume
- 9
- Number
- 4
- Start Page
- 436
- End Page
- 446
- URI
- https://scholarworks.bwise.kr/cau/handle/2019.sw.cau/63187
- DOI
- 10.1037/ppm0000259
- ISSN
- 2689-6567
- Abstract
- The K-pop fandom community has transnationally evolved through social media, making itself known and represented through the pronoun “we” for identity work. Although the pronominal register for self-referencing reflects social identity beyond egocentric consciousness, it also evokes perceived proximity of the addressee with the utterance for group cohesion. We, therefore, performed computational text analysis using 179,350 English-written comments on the Facebook page for fans of a globally emerging K-pop boyband Bangtan Sonyeondan from May 2013 to March 2018. This study found the following: (a) that the first-person plural pronoun “we” was on the rise in the linguistic organizing, (b) that we-words were more likely to be paired with words about interpersonal processes rather than ones about intrapersonal processes, and (c) that the primacy given to “we” for self-referencing over “I” predicted the greater level of group interactions, manifested by giving a “like” to or making a “comment” on messages from each other. We further discuss why the plural pronoun “we” in fandom language is tied to the coming of a new cultural identity in a digital age. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2020 APA, all rights reserved) © 2019 American Psychological Association
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