Shadow Infrastructures and Youth Agency: K-Pop Fans in Beijing Universities under Institutional Restriction
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.54097/t7s2j202Keywords:
K-Pop fandom; shadow infrastructures; youth agency; transnational cultural participation; platform governance.Abstract
With the strengthening of platform governance and content regulation, young people are reshaping the channels of cross-border cultural exchange. This paper studies how K-Pop fans at Beijing universities continue to be interested in South Korean popular culture after the main platforms for dissemination have been shut down. Based on the semi-structured interviews with the fifteen student followers and digital ethnography and textual scrutiny, it can be found that institutional constraints impact their daily media behaviour in the following ways. We find that the restriction is not easy to lift. Instead, it has reduced the public awareness of Korean media, made the forms of participation more formal, and raised the cost of accessing information; thus, fans have turned to other places instead of leaving. To maintain communication among themselves, the fans have built what is known as a "shadow infrastructure", which is an unofficial system organised by the fans that includes cloud storage, foreign platforms and geographically dispersed virtual groups, and this requires extra effort in terms of emotions, technology and management. These frameworks are not only temporary circumstances but also creative networks created by young people in the face of media restrictions. This idea has been applied to the study of fandom, platform analysis and transnational media to investigate the decentralized infrastructure supporting the spread of culture today.
Downloads
References
[1] Jenkins, H. (1992). Textual poachers: Television fans and participatory culture. Routledge.
[2] Gillespie, T. (2018). Custodians of the internet: Platforms, content moderation, and the hidden decisions that shape social media. Yale University Press.
[3] van Dijck, J., Poell, T., & de Waal, M. (2018). The platform society: Public values in a connective world. Oxford University Press.
[4] Lee, S., & Nornes, A. M. (Eds.). (2015). Hallyu 2.0: The Korean wave in the age of social media. University of Michigan Press.
[5] Yin, Y. (2020). Data fans and digital fandom in China. Celebrity Studies, 11(4), 493–509.
[6] Andrejevic, M. (2002). The work of being watched: Interactive media and the exploitation of self-disclosure. Critical Studies in Media Communication, 19(2), 230–248.
[7] Terranova, T. (2000). Free labor: Producing culture for the digital economy. Social Text, 18(2), 33–58.
[8] Stanfill, M. (2019). Exploiting fandom: How the media industry seeks to manipulate fans. University of Iowa Press.
[9] de Certeau, M. (1984). The practice of everyday life. University of California Press.
[10] Harvey, P., Jensen, C. B., & Morita, A. (Eds.). (2017). Infrastructures and social complexity: A companion. Routledge.
[11] Huang, H., & Wu, Y. (2023). Platform as intermediary: The movement of K-Pop merchandise and the reconstruction of fandom hierarchy. Journalism & Communication Research (in Chinese).
[12] Sun, L., & Xu, J. Y. (2023). Participation or silence: Digital media practices and opinion expression among K-Pop fans. Media Observer, (5), 44–50 (in Chinese).
[13] Yang, M., & Qian, C. (2020). Fans' transnational participation in a framework of embedded resistance: Chinese fans of Korean idols. Journalism & Communication Review, 73(3), 78–89 (in Chinese).
[14] Wei, W. (2018). The phenomenon of Chinese K-Pop fan stations on Sina Weibo. Modern Communication, (10), 84–85 (in Chinese).
[15] Gong, Y. N. (2021). Affective labor in the interaction between K-Pop idols and fans. Press Circles, (3), 20–21, 24 (in Chinese).
[16] Chen, L. (2018). Affective labor and incorporation: Fundraising and support activities of K-Pop fans on Baidu Tieba. Cultural Studies, (34), 124–135 (in Chinese).
Downloads
Published
Issue
Section
License
Copyright (c) 2026 Academic Journal of Management and Social Sciences
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.
