Creating Threads, Making Archives: A Study of Organizing and Indexing Practices Around Idols’ Photos on Twitter

Abstract

ARMY (short for “Adorable Representative M.C. for Youth”), who are the fans of the boy band Bangtan Sonyeondan or BTS, are credited with making effective use of social media to direct fan engagement toward meeting fandom goals like trending comebacks, topping charts, and organizing charitable projects on a global scale before such fannish activities had become mainstream. While their ingenious use of social media has been the subject of much scholarly interest, the multifarious ways in which the fans organize and archive information to participate in the fandom are relatively less explored. Building on this possibility, this study analyses ARMY’s use of Twitter threads by (1) conducting a microanalysis of interactions between fans within these threads and (2) content analysis of the original posts created largely around the themes of idols’ appearance/personality, idol-idol interactions and idol-fan interactions. Closer examination of the threads reveals similarities with archival motives to shed light on important discourses in the fandom’s subcultural imagination and reflect fannish efforts at preserving “memories” of the bands’ eras or capturing interpersonal dynamics, that transform the threads into rich sites for information dissemination, much like traditional archives, although they tend to offer greater agency as curators to those who create and engage with such threads.

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