Fandom, Social Media, and Identity Work: The Emergence of Virtual Community Through the Pronoun "We

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.