ETHNOGRAPHY PROCESS PAGE
Kpop Stans on Twitter
How has participating in Kpop culture influenced fans to expand their own ideologies?
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
This process page is for an ethnography class where we conducted an applied ethnography, which is an ethnography conducted in a non-academic context done in a much shorter amount of time than that of a normal ethnography. My team consisted of me (Cady) and two other classmates, Jordan and Makayla. We had about 4 weeks to conduct our research and come up with our findings. We studied kpop stans on twitter and how listening to kpop has changed their ideologies (anything from learning to like Korean food to Korean culture.) We did this by conducting five interviews and observed the interactions of 30 kpop stan accounts on Twitter.
If there is any term that you are unaware of, which I assume will be most do not worry, there is a glossary at the bottom of the page.
RESEARCH DESIGN
For the research design section of our class, we filled out a form our professor gave us in order to set the basis of our project. In this form, we had to choose our field or basically what specifically we wanted to study, why we wanted to study it , and what our research questions was going to be. For our field, we decided that the best and most interesting place to observe kpop stans was Twitter since that is a predominantly where they gather according to the kpop stans we have in our group, myself and Jordan.
We wanted to study kpop stan Twitter because all of us had some sort of interest in it such as Makayla wanting to learn more because of her Asian background, Jordan wanting to learn more about kpop stan Twitter because she has not been a part of it for very long, and myself, Cady, who has been on kpop stan Twitter for the past three years and knows it is a very interesting place. We were also all interested in kpop itself because it is very fascinating to see how it has grown in popularity all over the world.
After deciding we all wanted to research kpop, we had to form exactly what we wanted to know about kpop stans. We decide that in order to see the full scale of what stans actually learn after getting into kpop, we had to ask something quite broad. Our research question ended up being “How has participating in kpop culture influenced fans to expand their ideologies.” This allowed us to not only talk about the culture behind stan Twitter but also talk about Korean culture and how fans learn more of South Korea and other aspects than just kpop once they commit to being a fan.
CONTEXTUAL INQUIRY
Our contextual inquiry, learning what we need to know about our topic in order to conduct useful research, happened toward the beginning of our project. For the members of our group that had no background in kpop, this was a very important time for them to learn what kpop actually is in the eyes of fans. This could be anything from listening to kpop to understand what the hype is about or talking to someone on stan twitter to see what they actually do and why it is so important to them. We do this at the beginning of the project in order to make sure everyone is on the same page and understands at least the basics of how stan Twitter actually works.
For the sake of my research and fieldwork, I did not do much contextual research because I have been doing that for the past three years being a part of kpop stan Twitter. I know the language that stan Twitter uses and what many terms, such as “stan” or “oomf,” mean and their contexts, how stan Twitter functions, and I understand why so many people love kpop because I am a kpop stan myself. I did, however, conduct contextual inquiry while we were actually into the research portion in order to understand what some of our participants were talking about if it was an area I was not already educated in.
RECRUITMENT
Our recruitment process consisted of us finding kpop stans that we knew for interviews since this is indeed for a class and we do not have a list of people to interview from. We also selected thirty Twitter accounts, ten from each of us, to observe how they interacted with other stans on Twitter and just how they tweeted in general. We ended up with five interviewees and 30 accounts to observe of the span of about four weeks.
We had a friend of mine, my sister, a friend of both me and Jordan, Jordan’s friend, and Makayla’s cousin. Everyone other than Makayla’s cousin is currently a kpop stan that is a part of stan Twitter.
FIELDWORK
Fieldwork is really split into two sections: observation and interviewing. To explain this in the best way possible, I have split it up into different sections below.
OBSERVATION
Observation was all done separately so we could all notice patterns without being influenced by each other and for the obvious fact that we cannot meet due to COVID-19. I did my observation in three different sections, my users, Jordan’s users and then Makaylas’s users. For all three sections, I did my jottings by going through each account in the list and seeing what the majority of their tweets were about, if they had anything significant in their bio or display name, and how they interacted with other accounts within stan Twitter. Below are a few things that I found significant on many accounts.
After watching these accounts for a few weeks, I felt that I understood how the average kpop stan account behaved.
PROFILE PICTURE
Generally, I noticed that many of them used kpop idols as their profile picture instead of using their own faces to preserve anonymity or just because they like the picture of the kpop idol they have up.
POLITICS
Many of them participated in talking about opinions on more than just kpop, such as the Black Lives Matter movement, LGBTQ+ rights, and general political opinions.
KPOP DRAMA
Of course, they also talked about drama within the kpop community, such as fanwars, drama about kpop groups and how their companies treat them, and issues with youtube deleting views off kpop music videos.
INTERVIEWS
We conducted our five interviews as a team with one person being the moderator and two others being facilitators. Three of our interviews were done via video chat and two of them had to be done via a messaging app due to one of our interviewees undergoing recent oral surgery and the other one having phone anxiety. In Meghan and Stephanies interview, Jordan was the moderator and in Teeda’s interview, Makayla was the moderator. I took notes and recorded every interview. For the two texting interviews, we were all in the groupchat but I sent the questions and asked any follow up questions we had.
Meghan's Interview
Our first interview was with Meghan, my sister. She is has been a kpop stan since 2018 and frequently participates in stan Twitter. She got into kpop because of her sister, me, getting her to listen to it and she “has been hooked ever since.” A few things we found interesting about her were that she dyed her hair and got a piercing because she realized she liked it on kpop idols and she has a “kpop wall” in her room that has multiple kpop posters and photocards on it so she can show off her merch.
Stephanie's Interview
Our next interview was with Stephanie, a friend of me and Jordan. She is a long time kpop stan and said she got into kpop in 2009 because she heard an Epik High, male kpop group, song on her brother’s FIFA game. She said she also had friends in fifth grade who got her to stick with kpop and she has listened to it ever since. Her perspective on language was one thing we found very interesting saying that “the idea of foreign language was not foreign” because she grew up around foreign languages such as Ebo and Japanese. Her input was very helpful since she has been in the community for such a long time and has some reference of how kpop was before it got as popular as it is now.
Chante's Interview
The next interview was with Chante, Jordan’s friend. She has been listening to kpop since 2017 and is strictly a BTS fan. What we found quite interesting about her interview was that she got very into the history of Korea and the culture not only of kpop. She learned about the dynasties, internal affairs of Korea and Koreas relationships with other countries all out of pure interest after getting into kpop.
Tara's Interview
The final interview was with Tara, a friend of mine. She is also strictly a BTS stan but listens to other groups on the side. She has been a kpop stan since 2014 when a friend of hers introduced her to BTS. She was another person that said once she became interested in kpop she never left. She was very interesting to interview because she was one of few people who said that originally they had an issue with the language barrier. She said she was a little concerned about the fact that she could not understand them but after listening to a few songs she realized it was not a big deal saying that “as long as it sounds good to me, I don’t really care too much that I don’t always understand what it’s saying.”
ANALYSIS
After we all wrote did our own fieldwork, we got together to compare what we had found that was interesting to us. This included anything from Jordan noticing that many accounts had little symbols to tell other people they were a fan of certain groups, Makayla noticing that over half of our accounts were BTS fans and that BTS must be one of the most popular groups right now, and me noticing that referring to idols as ”babies” or “cuties” is very common. We made a list of everything we found interesting and then divided that into different categories to decide what we should write about in our research report. We ended up with five categories that everything we found could fall into: culture (Korean and kpop), identity, community, beliefs, and stereotypes. We then made a chart, or what our professor referred to as a matrix, to sort all of our information from interview and observations into those categories.
REPORTING
Once we had all of our information together so we could see what all of us found, we broke everything down into where it would go into our report. Jordan suggested we do an introductions to kpop and whit it is section, a section on how people discovered kpop, a section explaining stan Twitter, a section on kpop stan culture, and section about what outside of kpop have people learned since getting into kpop. We split this up to where I wrote the sections about what kpop is and how people got into it, Jordan wrote about stan Twitter and kpop stan culture, and Makayla wrote about what everyone had learned outside of kpop.
GLOSSARY
KPOP
Kpop is a very broad genre of music consisting of hip-hop, rock, and pop that originated in South Korea.
STAN
they are fans of kpop who dedicate a certain portion of their time to learn more than just the songs of a kpop group
OOMF
shortened version of “one of my followers”
BIO
the paragraph at the top of a social media profile to describe what the account is about or used for
DISPLAY NAME
the name of the account that shows up with the username
KPOP IDOL
the individual member of a kpop group
PHOTOCARD
a 2x3 inch picture of 1 member of a kpop group generally included when you buy a kpop album