Sharing Fancams as a User Practice: My Final Paper for TDC

What follows is the introduction for my final paper for my “Transformations in Digital Cultures” class, which focuses on fancams. Download the file at the bottom of the post to read the whole paper!

During the height of the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement in the USA and other parts of the world fancams (a combination of the word “fan” and “camera”), which originally are videos taken by fans of K-pop performances honed in on a single member of a group, were used by Twitter stans from all over the world in support of the movement. They did this by using fancams as a counter-movement to what they considered hate speech, such as #AllLivesMatter, as well as a tool to effectively hide videos that showed faces of protestors from police forces in the USA.

Fascinated by these recent events, I set out to study this practice of using fancams as a way to spam and drown out hateful or problematic voices, and what its impacts are. In order to do so, I traced fancams and the different ways in which they are shared back to their roots in the Korean pop (Kpop) industry, investigate how their use evolved in the online community of “Kpop stan Twitter” (Malik & Haidar, 2020), and later spread to the stan Twitter community at large. For this research, I use the approach of digital ethnography, as it allows me to make close personal observations of practices, and combine those with a qualitative interview with a member of stan Twitter. Like Malik & Haidar, I use Wegner’s (2015) idea of a Community of Practice (CoP) to argue that the sharing of a fancam itself can be considered a user practice within CoP of stan Twitter, by showing that the sharing on fancams can be “done well or badly” (Barnes, 2001, p. 27). I then use Swierstra’s (2015) theory of technomoral change to study the impact of the ways fancams are being shared, arguing that they have soft impacts.

Read Full Text:

Image: Blackpink

Hani from Kpop group EXID performing Up & Down, in what many call the most iconic fancam to date.

2 Comments

  1. Dear Mark,
    I see that we have chosen a similar topic on online community, yet the platforms we used to analyze were totally different in terms of users language and geographical locations of majority users. Yet, I definitely found common practices that people conduct from your paper, especially when you discuss about the faneidts and “professional fans”, which I didn’t really fully elaborate in mine. This similarity among people really makes me to reflect on the discussion about cultural purity and similarity. As I am not a user of Twitter, but from your way of description, I think it matches to Chinese Weibo( I also barely use ), as it also has the hashtag function. It didn’t occur to me that fans would add irrelevant things to their posts just to increase exposure, which gives me a new way of thinking on users’ behavior to platform functions and the technomoral change it may have to their users. In a word, I think your paper is really interesting and the way that you narrated makes me feel enjoyable when reading it.
    Best
    Qinwen

  2. Hi Marc!

    I really liked your paper! It was far deeper than everything I knew about Twitter and it made me question how the platform and fancams (maybe not more fancams in its original meaning) are being used to promote social movements 🙂 Mostly because of your example of the #ReclamingMyShine, I was curious to know if this practice could maybe change the notions of gender, sexuality, and bias of a determined community on Twitter. Maybe this could be a way to go further in the research. In general, excellent writing and choice of topic!

    Camila

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