“To be that one other brick in the pillar”: Online Communities, Platforms, and Collective Action in the BTS Industrial Complex

Paper Title

“To be that one other brick in the pillar”: Online Communities, Platforms, and Collective Action in the BTS Industrial Complex

Publication Info

• Topic area: Sociotechnical ecosystems of fandoms and their interaction with digital platforms.
• Keywords: BTS Industrial Complex, ARMY fandom, digital platforms, fan labor, solidarity, boundary policing, cultural economies, HCI, platform capitalism, collective action.

Background and Problem

• Problem / challenge: Existing research on digital fandoms often overlooks their entanglement with platform infrastructures and capitalist economies, focusing primarily on community-centered lenses rather than industrial systems.
• Significance: Understanding fandoms as sociotechnical ecosystems reveals their role in shaping cultural economies, highlighting how collective practices translate into economic and symbolic value.
• Motivation and related work: Prior studies in HCI and CSCW have examined fandoms as sociotechnical systems, emphasizing identity formation, activism, and creativity. However, gaps remain in understanding how fandoms interact with digital platforms and broader industrial logics, particularly in large-scale communities like BTS ARMY.

Solution

• Proposed approach: The paper introduces the concept of the BTS Industrial Complex (BTS-IC), a sociotechnical ecosystem where BTS fandom ARMY, digital platforms, and entertainment industries co-produce symbolic, affective, and economic value.
• Novelty:
  1. Conceptualization of the BTS Industrial Complex as a sociotechnical and cultural-economic formation.
  2. Empirical insights into how platforms mediate collective fan practices and labor.
  3. Implications for HCI in designing for and critically examining large-scale cultural economies.
• Procedure and key techniques:
  • Mixed-method qualitative study combining an online survey (598 valid responses) and 3.5 years of participant observation.
  • Iterative coding of survey responses and ethnographic data to identify themes: symbolic anchoring, platform-mediated collectivities, and boundary negotiations.
  • Reflexive methodology incorporating insider perspectives and ethical practices such as anonymization and member-checking.

Results

• Concrete findings:
  • ARMY’s practices sustain the BTS-IC through symbolic anchoring of BTS as cultural figures, collective labor for visibility and protection, and boundary policing to maintain community cohesion.
  • ARMY’s streaming, voting, and promotional activities translate affective commitments into measurable circulation and economic value.
  • Boundary negotiations within ARMY balance inclusivity and exclusivity, ensuring community reliability while supporting BTS’s visibility.
• Advantage over baselines: The study extends prior fandom research by situating ARMY within a broader industrial context, highlighting the interplay between fan practices, platform infrastructures, and capitalist logics.
• Experiments / evaluation:
  • Survey demographics: Mean age 37.34 years; 94.64% female respondents.
  • Participant observation: 40 hours/week on Twitter/X and 5–8 hours/week on other platforms over 3.5 years.
  • Analysis of platform affordances (e.g., anonymity, collaboration tools) and their role in shaping ARMY’s practices.
• Limitations and future work:
  • Findings reflect primarily Western and English-speaking ARMY contexts, limiting generalizability across the global fandom.
  • Future research could explore the impact of emerging technologies like generative AI on fandom practices and cultural economies.

Summary

This paper introduces the BTS Industrial Complex (BTS-IC) as a sociotechnical ecosystem where BTS fandom ARMY, digital platforms, and entertainment industries co-produce symbolic, affective, and economic value. Through qualitative analysis of ARMY’s practices, the study reveals how digital platforms mediate community solidarity, collective labor, and boundary enforcement, transforming fan affect into industrial outputs. Findings highlight the ambivalence of fandom participation, where expressions of love and care simultaneously sustain capitalist infrastructures. The BTS-IC serves as a case study for broader cultural economies, offering insights into how digital publics organize, mobilize, and contest exploitation in platform-mediated environments.