As my media niche is Kpop and how groups in JYP are promoted, I needed a kpop article. For background research I am going to be using this article by Minjeong Kim et al. This article will help contextualise the promotions of kpop and the social media. This academic article is a great cross section for what I hope to accomplish, only on a smaller scale. The academic article used twitter for their research and collected tweets with the hashtag #kpop to collect their data. Their methodology is very similar to what I want to achieve in this subject. However, this was about comparing global twitter networks, whereas mine focuses on a particular kpop group. This article helps with my primary research and how to make it more in depth It will help me analyse my Digital Artefact by setting times to look at feeds such as “looked at #itzy for 30 minutes’ and summarise findings from there. The journal Article also has a Node Network that they used, and while I can’t use it for my project as it involves connecting accounts together and revealing what or who they are connected to, I can get some inspiration from it and make something similar.
Ethical issues that can arise from this research are-
Reading and using tweets or social media that are not my own. For this assignment I can’t use other people’s tweets as it would be a breach of privacy without any consent. I can only summarise and give my opinions on what I felt the comment was about.
Another ethical issue that can arise from being on the internet is getting involved with comments or tweets, by deliberatively inciting conflict to put a certain line of thinking in my research. My involvement should be observatory only and to not cross an ethical line with comments.
Kpop is also an industry with a long list of ethical issues that can overlap with social media, and a big one pertaining to my topic is fansites. Fansites, to explain in simpler terms, are fans of a specific person in a kpop group,that follow them around with a DSL Camera and take photographs of them. Fansites are also not ‘sites’, they are just a person with a twitter account that only upload pictures of a certain member.
While there are fansites that are respectful and only take photos at concerts from the crowd, there are also many other fansites that are blacklisted by companies by being too invasive either by following them at airports or going to all of their events. There was even a fansite that attended all the stops of love yourself tour that BTS went to.
I would also recommend this video by DKDKTV, who went to a Kpop event, and recounted their experiences with fans, starting at 39:09
Other issues to touch on-
‘Sasaeng’ fans. These are possessive and fanatical, gong as far to stalk their idol and trade information on idols private lives. Some even leak out phone number details or addresses.
‘Fanservice’ in Vlive by streaming live video from a phone to make it seem more intimate, and while not a bad concept, can contribute to sasaeng culture.
Amely Koenig's Blog and Art 