Fourteenth International Conference on Interdisciplinary Social Sciences

Abstract

On 16th September 2018, before the release of a new album, one of BTS’s album songs disappeared. Because BTS’s fan club that is named as Army has found out that a Japanese writer who wrote that song lyrics has a tendency of misogyny and ‘Japanese left-wing’ to praise, glorify, and deny the invasion and colonization of Japan to Korea. Army boycotted of this album and BTS’s agency through fan club community and SNS. The previous fandoms before Army had shown to deny and block the blame and scandal about idol group internal problems without checking true or false. This study looks at the reason why the fandom reaction in the past and now about their idol’s internal problem is distinct. I thought that it was related to SNS because the zone of fandom activity now is done through SNS freely, unlike the previous one was limited to the fan café. From this, the study was conducted with grounded theory of qualitative research. After conceptualizing previous studies, a model is made. According to this model, fandom activities through SNS, especially Twitter, have had a positive influence on reducing social distance with idol stars and emphasize the collective moralism among fans online. Therefore, fandom activities through SNS had a positive effect on fan behaviorism. The results can help entertainment agency employees can set up measures for handling fandom activities and raise awareness of the importance of understanding fandom SNS activities. These findings will provide implications for both research and practice.