The Darker Side of K-pop?
With hundreds of millions of dollars currently invested to make itself into a regional hub for the arts, entertainment and tourist industries, as well as the growth in conspicuous consumption among its youths, Singapore is a thriving consumer society.
By J. Patrick Williams
K-pop
With hundreds of millions of dollars currently invested to make itself into a regional hub for the arts, entertainment and tourist industries, as well as the growth in conspicuous consumption among its youths, Singapore is a thriving consumer society. There are many dynamic consumer micro-cultures to be found, including K-pop fandom. Like other countries across Asia, Singapore annually hosts a variety of international events starring Korean pop artists, including concerts and festivals, showcases, autograph and meet-and-greet sessions, product launch events, fashion shows, grand prix and award ceremonies among others. Such industry-sponsored events are matched by a booming local cultural milieu in which all things Korean are taken up enthusiastically, particularly by young people in their teens and early 20s. From the popularity of Korean as a foreign language at local colleges and language schools, to the dense social media networks through which Singaporeans share information about their K-pop idols, when Korean pop culture comes to Singapore it is met by eager youth audiences who invest not only economic, but also cognitive and emotional resources into their fandom.
K-pop as a pop-culture market phenomenon has been growing steadily since the 1990s and is often referred to as the “hallyu” (한류) or “Korean wave.” In 2012 Korea’s culture ministry estimated that hallyu exports were worth US$83.2 billion1, while in 2013 annual revenue among the top Korean pop-music agencies was reportedly in the hundreds of millions of dollars.2
Meanwhile, the Korean government itself has established a US$1 billion investment fund to support the domestic music industry. K-pop artists have achieved immense popularity via music, television and other entertainment channels and boast a massive following of consumers and fans across East and Southeast Asia.3 Singapore promoter Running Into the Sun has noted the fervent loyalty of local fans and their willingness to pay for K-pop merchandise and experiences. "Concert merchandise is a big part of the concert experience, and fans usually come earlier to purchase them before the concert. Most K-pop fans are also in their teens and tend to be more demonstrative than older fans in their support for their idol," said a spokesperson of the firm in an interview.4
Youth culture and K-pop fandom
As youth culture researchers have long noted, young people are increasingly reliant on consumer practices that create meaningful peer cultures and that shape their identity and status. Such practices are said to enable a sense of stability for young people in a world that is rapidly changing5. It seems quite clear at ground level that K-pop has enabled many young people to forge common identities around shared taste and consumption. Such identities, however, are not a simple matter, and the study of consumption-based identities such as K-pop fandom must take complexity of youth cultures and identities into account. Surprisingly, while K-pop as a cultural and economic phenomenon has already been studied in some depth in the last decade, there is almost no research on what it means to be a K-pop fan.
In recent years there has been a rise in so-called “extreme” K-pop fandom. In Korea, such fansa re collectively referred to as sasaeng fans (사생). Based on the Korean term sasaengpaen (사생팬)—a portmanteau of sasaenghwal (사생활 or “private life”) and paen (팬 or “fan”)—a sasaeng fan is one who is seen as abnormally interested in the private lives of K-pop celebrities. The intensity of such fans sometimes goes beyond mere loyalty. In Korea, young (often female, but not exclusively) fans stalk K-pop celebrities or otherwise intrude into their private lives, affecting the celebrities physically and emotionally. Such behaviors are shaped in part by “trophy seeking,” where fans seek to collect and subsequently display souvenirs to other fans.6 Trophies may be physical objects such as autographs or photos, but may also be stories about personal exploits. Sasaeng behaviors are also shaped by the power imbalance they contain—fans know much more about celebrities than vice versa and thus fans can disrupt the normal fan-celebrity relationship, thus gaining at least a temporary sense of power and self-efficacy.
As the K-pop phenomenon swells, fans from other Asian countries have also begun to adopt similarly troubling behaviors, mostly based on creating unscripted encounters between themselves and K-pop celebrities. In Singapore and elsewhere, young people spend hundreds of dollars to hire large-capacity vans to “stalk” artists around town as they move between hotels, concert venues, and public/private events. At each location, young fans will then attempt to become noticed by artists, often by carrying homemade signs expressing love, support or encouragement, or by offering gifts to the celebrities. The small percentage of fans that engage in such unscripted behaviors risks being labeled as sasaeng by the majority of fans, who find such behaviors inappropriate and even reckless.
Young Singaporean fans flock around a group of male K-pop artists and their bodyguard as they transit from their hotel. The artists’ hands are full of gifts given by the fans.
An ethnographic approach
Researchers should pay attention to the complex ways in which consumer identities are created and circulated. Identifying as a K-pop fan is a not a neutral process, but rather one that has potential positive as well as negative effects. For this reason, it is important to develop a deep understanding of how consumers make sense of their own identities and behaviors in relation to their fandom. To understand how fans see themselves, one must obtain access to their everyday lives. This deep understanding can be achieved through ethnographic research methods, which include: “hanging out” to observe and/or participate with fans at sites where fandom happens; in-depth interviews with individual fans, not only to learn about their consumption habits, but about their fandom more generally; the collection and analysis of media “texts” such as news stories, blogs, and twitter posts, each of which can give insights into the meanings fandom has for people. Such methods enable researchers to understand fans not only in terms of a market demographic, but to make sense of how various identities circulate and are experienced. In the case of K-pop, fan identities affect the consumers’ choices about which artists to like or support (and which not), their relations with K-pop culture and products, as well as their relations with family, friends, and other consumers.
In our recent study of K-pop fandom, an ethnographic approach enabled insights into the potentially problematic nature of fan loyalty. First, we regularly searched local social networking sites for news about K-pop and paid attention to the comments users would write. We found that public discourse on K-pop fan identities in Singapore were almost entirely negative when it involved behaviors linked to Korean sasaeng fans, such as “stalking.” In Singaporean news articles and on local social networking sites, terms used to describe extreme K-pop fans included “crazed,” “dangerous,” “excessive,” “irresponsible,” and “pathetic.” These terms were regularly used in connection with specific behaviors such as stalking artists in rented vans or waiting in airport or hotel lobbies. A second ethnographic strategy involved joining young Singaporeans in a rented van to “stalk” a group of K-pop musicians that was performing locally, and stood at their airport, hotels, and other venues waiting for the celebrities to appear. We also joined their whatsapp and twitter groups to observe their interactions before, during and after such events. Third, we conducted in-depth interviews with young fans to access their subjective understandings of their own identities and behaviors. What we found was a complex process through which young Singaporean fans worked to distance themselves from what they saw as extreme fan identities, while nevertheless engaging is similar behaviors. On the one hand, they saw their behaviors as relatively innocuous: “our kind of stalking is just waiting for and following the K-pop idols from schedule to schedule, venues to venues; not to the level of stalking such as finding out their phone numbers, call records and bank transactions. There are different levels of stalking—ours is just the amateur level.”
On the other hand, the youths we studied did not simply reject the idea of being an extreme fan, primarily because its opposite is the unremarkable passive consumer. Rather they feared being seen as too extreme as well as too passive. As cultural consumers, they enjoyed being part of a larger community of fandom and did not want to be seen as deviant. Yet, they also sought recognition and/or status within that community, and rejected the idea that passive consumers were full members of the fan community. For them, “true” fandom demanded finding ways to consume celebrities beyond officially sanctioned contexts such as concerts or autograph sessions.
Conclusion
It is important for those in industry to recognise that consumer identities are cultural products, manufactured in part by marketers, in part by mass and social media actors, but also through interactions among fans as they negotiate the meaning of their own consumption and fandom in relation to other consumers. And because youth consumer culture is a constantly shifting phenomenon, it demands that researchers stay in close touch with young people’s everyday lives. An ethnographic approach shed light on the processes through which K-pop fan practices and identities were made meaningful in the everyday lives of young Singaporeans. The significance of these practices and identities likely would not have been uncovered through survey or experimental research, because those approaches either focus on testing hypotheses in laboratory conditions, or over-relying on consumers’ reports of their behavior. As such, these methods are subject to the well-established confounds that people don’t always report the truth, or they don’t know why they do what they do. Ethnographic methods circumvented these limitations by enabling us to collect data from a variety of sources, which we used to triangulate and validate our findings. Given the dynamic aspects of youth consumer cultures, ethnography can provide very useful insights into emerging as well as established phenomena and processes.
Footnotes
2 http://www.cnbc.com/2013/11/26/die-hard-fans-drive-k-pops-multi-million-dollar-industry.html
3 Chua, Beng Huat. 2004. Conceptualising an East Asian popular culture, Inter-Asia Cultural Studies, 5(2), 200-221. Chua, Beng Huat, and Koichi Iwabuchi (eds.) 2008. East Asian Pop Culture: Analysing the Korean Wave. Hong Kong University Press.
4 http://www.cnbc.com/2013/11/26/die-hard-fans-drive-k-pops-multi-million-dollar-industry.html
5 Miles, S. (2000) Youth Lifestyles in a Changing World, Open University Press, Buckingham, Philadelphia.
6 Ferris, Kerry O. and Scott R. Harris. 2011. Stargazing: Celebrity, Fame, and Social Interaction. New York: Routledge.
About the author
Dr J. Patrick Williams is a Fellow of the Institute on Asian Consumer Insight and an Associate Professor at Division of Sociology, School of Humanities and Social Sciences, Nanyang Technological University. As a sociologist and social psychologist, he is trained in symbolic interactionism, a perspective that foregrounds self and meaning as key concepts for understanding culture and everyday life. He uses primarily qualitative methods and has research interests in youth cultures, subcultures, and digital media.
