Armed in ARMY: A Case Study of How BTS Fans Successfully Collaborated to #MatchAMillion for Black Lives Matter

Title of the Paper

Armed in ARMY: A Case Study of How BTS Fans Successfully Collaborated to #MatchAMillion for Black Lives Matter

Paper Information

• Subject Area: Fan culture, collaboration, human-computer interaction, and social computing
• Keywords: Online community, collaborative success, teamwork, fan culture, fan activism, charity
• Published in Conference: CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI ’21), 2021
• Authors: So Yeon Park, Nicole Santero, Blair Kaneshiro, Jin Ha Lee

Research Background and Problem

• Identified Issues and Challenges:

  1. Fan culture is often portrayed negatively by the media (e.g., bullying and doxxing), with insufficient attention to its positive impacts.
  2. It remains unclear how large fan communities can transcend their original purposes to make significant contributions to unrelated social goals, such as charity.
  3. Despite lacking explicit leadership, BTS’s fan community ARMY successfully organized the #MatchAMillion campaign in 2020, raising over $1 million for the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement. The specific mechanisms and impacts of this success are unknown.

• Significance of the Research: Exploring how fan culture can effectively collaborate to serve unrelated social goals not only deepens the understanding of online communities but also provides guidance for future research and practices in similar communities.

• Motivation and Related Work:

  1. Fan activism and participatory culture have developed rapidly in recent years, and BTS and its ARMY fanbase, as a globally influential case, are particularly worth studying.
  2. Existing literature suggests that online communities, due to their scale and highly interconnected nature, have the potential to achieve significant collective actions. However, there is a lack of detailed analysis of their shared values, trust, culture, and collaborative characteristics.

Solution

• Proposed Methods and Solutions: The authors adopted a case study approach based on surveys, collecting responses from 273 ARMY members, focusing on three aspects:

  1. Fans’ perceptions of the ARMY community as a whole.
  2. Individual participation in social collaborative activities and its impact.
  3. Key factors contributing to ARMY’s success in the #MatchAMillion campaign.

• Innovative Aspects of the Solution:

  1. Proposed a framework based on organizational culture theory, categorizing ARMY’s fan culture as a mix of “market-oriented” and “family-oriented” organizational cultures and analyzing their impact on collaboration.
  2. Explored the roles of team psychological safety, team efficacy, and team composition in collaborative success and constructed a mediation model of their relationships.
  3. Provided design implications based on ARMY’s successful experiences to guide the design of future online communities.

• Implementation Steps and Key Techniques:

  1. Designed a survey including open-ended questions, single-choice, and multiple-choice questions covering topics such as organizational culture, team trust and collaboration, and psychological safety.
  2. Analyzed quantitative data using statistical methods (e.g., t-tests, correlation analysis, linear regression).
  3. Categorized qualitative data using thematic analysis, employing a collaborative coding framework and codebook for consistency evaluation.

Research Findings

• Specific Findings:

  1. Team Culture and Characteristics: ARMY’s cultural traits were described as a combination of “market-oriented” (competition-driven) and “family-oriented” (connection and sharing-driven) characteristics. This tension fostered collaborative vitality.
  2. Trust and Organizational Structure: Despite the lack of a centralized hierarchy, ARMY’s “decentralized network structure” provided collaborative support through key accounts (e.g., One In An ARMY).
  3. Psychological Safety and Team Efficacy: Psychological safety, mediated by team composition, enhanced team efficacy and was significantly associated with successful collaboration (e.g., the #MatchAMillion campaign).
  4. Fans’ Contributions to Social Issues: Members demonstrated a high degree of shared values during the campaign, including a commitment to charity, inclusivity toward diverse social backgrounds, and strong motivation for action.

• Comparative Advantages Over Existing Solutions: By integrating organizational culture theory, team psychology, and fan collaboration practices, the study analyzed the unique advantages of ARMY’s global cross-cultural collaboration mechanisms.

• Experimental or Evaluation Results:

  1. The study identified a significant mediating effect in the relationship between fans’ psychological safety and team efficacy.
  2. The #MatchAMillion campaign not only enhanced team trust but also strengthened members’ social identity.

• Limitations and Future Directions:

  1. The data is primarily focused on Twitter fans, requiring further expansion to other social platforms.
  2. The survey relied on retrospective information, which may introduce bias. Future studies should consider longitudinal research to better control for temporal effects.
  3. Given the vast size of the ARMY fanbase, the sample is limited and does not fully represent the entire community’s perspectives. Future research should aim to broaden sample coverage.
  4. Comparative studies on different types of fan communities could further validate the generalizability of the findings.