Politicizing for the idol: China’s idol fandom nationalism in pandemic

IF 4.2 1区文学 Q1 COMMUNICATION

Information Communication & Society Pub Date : 2022-12-29 DOI:10.1080/1369118X.2022.2161827

Yan Wang, Ting Luo

{"title":"Politicizing for the idol: China’s idol fandom nationalism in pandemic","authors":"Yan Wang, Ting Luo","doi":"10.1080/1369118X.2022.2161827","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT Chinese idol fans have been identified among the main forces in cyber nationalist activisms in recent years, acting as the nationalist fans protecting the state as an idol in response to external political shocks. Their skills in acknowledging, involving, and even reinventing the image of the state and national pride in cyber nationalist activisms do not emerge in a vacuum. This article examines how idol fans involve and reinvent the nationalist discourse in their everyday fan activities – idol promotion. We focus on the pandemic in 2020 as it provides a specific social and political context that allows us to understand better the interaction between idol fans and the state in their mundane fan activities. We construct our analysis under the computational grounded theory framework with over 6 million fan posts collected from Weibo and 11 in-depth interviews with active idol fans. Our findings show that when engaging in pandemic-related discussion, idol fans actively borrowed official discourse on nationalism and strategically responded to key political and social events in their idol promotion activities. The idol images they built are not only positive but also nationalist. Therefore, they play not only the commercial logic commonly seen in the Japanese and Korean K-pop/idol culture but also the political logic propagated by the state in China.","PeriodicalId":48335,"journal":{"name":"Information Communication & Society","volume":"26 1","pages":"304 - 320"},"PeriodicalIF":4.2000,"publicationDate":"2022-12-29","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":"1","resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"Information Communication & Society","FirstCategoryId":"98","ListUrlMain":"https://doi.org/10.1080/1369118X.2022.2161827","RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"","PubModel":"","JCR":"Q1","JCRName":"COMMUNICATION","Score":null,"Total":0}

引用次数: 1

Abstract

ABSTRACT Chinese idol fans have been identified among the main forces in cyber nationalist activisms in recent years, acting as the nationalist fans protecting the state as an idol in response to external political shocks. Their skills in acknowledging, involving, and even reinventing the image of the state and national pride in cyber nationalist activisms do not emerge in a vacuum. This article examines how idol fans involve and reinvent the nationalist discourse in their everyday fan activities – idol promotion. We focus on the pandemic in 2020 as it provides a specific social and political context that allows us to understand better the interaction between idol fans and the state in their mundane fan activities. We construct our analysis under the computational grounded theory framework with over 6 million fan posts collected from Weibo and 11 in-depth interviews with active idol fans. Our findings show that when engaging in pandemic-related discussion, idol fans actively borrowed official discourse on nationalism and strategically responded to key political and social events in their idol promotion activities. The idol images they built are not only positive but also nationalist. Therefore, they play not only the commercial logic commonly seen in the Japanese and Korean K-pop/idol culture but also the political logic propagated by the state in China.

查看原文本刊更多论文

偶像政治化:流行中的中国偶像狂热民族主义

摘要近年来，中国偶像粉丝已被认定为网络民族主义活动的主要力量之一，他们是作为偶像保护国家以应对外部政治冲击的民族主义粉丝。他们在网络民族主义活动中承认、参与甚至重塑国家形象和民族自豪感的技能并不是凭空产生的。本文考察了偶像粉丝如何在日常粉丝活动中参与和重塑民族主义话语——偶像宣传。我们关注2020年的疫情，因为它提供了一个特定的社会和政治背景，使我们能够更好地了解偶像粉丝与国家在日常粉丝活动中的互动。我们在基于计算的理论框架下构建了我们的分析，从微博上收集了超过600万条粉丝帖子，并对活跃的偶像粉丝进行了11次深度采访。我们的研究结果表明，在参与与疫情相关的讨论时，偶像粉丝积极借用官方关于民族主义的话语，并在偶像宣传活动中战略性地应对关键的政治和社会事件。他们塑造的偶像形象不仅是正面的，而且是民族主义的。因此，他们不仅扮演了日本和韩国K-pop/偶像文化中常见的商业逻辑，还扮演了中国国家传播的政治逻辑。

本文章由计算机程序翻译，如有差异，请以英文原文为准。

求助全文

约1分钟内获得全文求助全文

来源期刊

Information Communication & Society Multiple-

CiteScore

10.20

自引率

4.80%

发文量

110

期刊介绍： Drawing together the most current work upon the social, economic, and cultural impact of the emerging properties of the new information and communications technologies, this journal positions itself at the centre of contemporary debates about the information age. Information, Communication & Society (iCS) transcends cultural and geographical boundaries as it explores a diverse range of issues relating to the development and application of information and communications technologies (ICTs), asking such questions as: -What are the new and evolving forms of social software? What direction will these forms take? -ICTs facilitating globalization and how might this affect conceptions of local identity, ethnic differences, and regional sub-cultures? -Are ICTs leading to an age of electronic surveillance and social control? What are the implications for policing criminal activity, citizen privacy and public expression? -How are ICTs affecting daily life and social structures such as the family, work and organization, commerce and business, education, health care, and leisure activities? -To what extent do the virtual worlds constructed using ICTs impact on the construction of objects, spaces, and entities in the material world? iCS analyses such questions from a global, interdisciplinary perspective in contributions of the very highest quality from scholars and practitioners in the social sciences, gender and cultural studies, communication and media studies, as well as in the information and computer sciences.