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

Academic Commentary
Title:	Armed in ARMY: A Case Study of How BTS Fans Successfully Collaborated to #MatchAMillion for Black Lives Matter
Commentator:	So Yeon Park (@syj_park), Jin Ha Lee (@ElegantLogic), Blair Kaneshiro (@BlairKaneshiro), and Nicole Santero (@ResearchBTS)
Date(s):	January 11, 2021
Medium:	PDF, Journal
Fandom:	ARMY (BTS)
External Links:	Full PDFArchived 5 April 2021 at the Wayback Machine Announcement Tweet @ResearchBTSArchived 8 April 2021 at the Wayback Machine
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In the summer of 2020, ARMY (BTS) organized the ARMY MatchAMillion Campaign and raised over one million USD to support Black Lives Matter. The commentators surveyed ARMYs who participated in the campaign about their perceptions of the fandom and their social effort.

Excerpts

Most ARMYs viewed the fandom as a community, loosely structured with pillar accounts. They reported trust in each other as well as high team composition, which mediated the relationship between their neutral psychological safety and high efficacy. Respondents attributed their success in #MatchAMillion to shared values, good teamwork, and established infrastructure. Our findings elucidate contextual factors that contribute to ARMY’s collaborative success and highlight themes that may be applied to studying other fandoms and their collaborative efforts. --Abstract

Fans of celebrities, movies, characters, sports teams, and other public fgures are increasingly growing in size and impact, as evident from such tangible examples as the crowdsourced fan series “Star Trek Continues” and the work done by the Harry Potter Alliance, a non-proft run primarily by Harry Potter fans who fight for human rights. Similarly, music fandoms have become prominent in the current landscape of social media, collaboratively accomplishing goals on these platforms on a regular basis. --Introduction

ARMY (Adorable Representative M.C. for Youth) is the fandom of BTS, a music band of seven members originating from South Korea that debuted as a unit in 2013. Estimated to be in the millions, ARMY has made headlines in popular media for many different reasons. It has undoubtedly become one of the most powerful and visible fandoms on social media, where they have accomplished a number of records. --Introduction

One of ARMY’s most prominent accomplishments beyond these record-breaking music efforts was their June 2020 #MatchAMillion campaign, in which they raised more than one million USD for the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement. When BLM was reignited by the murder of George Floyd in late May of 2020, One In An ARMY (OIAA) mobilized to create a Twitter thread and establish a carrd, enabling ARMYs to donate to various organizations to “provide both immediate resources and long-term support for the Black Lives Matter movement and Black people”.3 On June 6, 2020, it was made known that BTS and Big Hit Entertainment had donated one million USD to BLM. This donation led to an idea for ARMY to match it, and soon fans on Twitter started sharing messages to encourage each other to achieve this goal. Approximately one day later, ARMY exceeded the one million USD donation. --Introduction

How does an online fandom collaborate autonomously, effectively, and impactfully for a cause that is unrelated to its initial purpose of formation? To address this question, we conducted a survey-based case study to examine ARMY’s recent #MatchAMillion campaign as a unique example of an impactful social collaborative effort. --Introduction

Our exploratory survey was designed to better understand (1) how ARMYs view the fandom as a collective, (2) how individuals become motivated to contribute to social collaborative efforts orchestrated by ARMY, and (3) how they perceive the fandom’s involvement in #MatchAMillion. Here, “social collaborative efort” (SCE) refers to collaborative eforts that ARMYs undertake for social reasons that are distinct from other collaborative activities that directly support BTS, such as streaming or voting. We sought to understand ARMYs’ mental models of the fandom’s structure, confidence in the collective, shared culture, as well as their motivations for and collective achievement of #MatchAMillion. In addition to exploratory questions, we also probed ARMYs’ perceptions of team characteristics (e.g., team composition, cohesion), organizational culture, and the fandom’s efcacy and viability from having achieved #MatchAMillion. --Introduction

Our work elucidates fans’ perspectives of their fandom—an instance of an online collective or community that is especially nebulous due to its organic formation and evolving membership. More importantly, we contribute to better understanding how a fandom collaborates effectively through a concrete SCE. We also shed light on fans’ perceptions of their collaborative efforts and the effects of the fandom’s success in achieving their goal in the #MatchAMillion campaign. By understanding the contextual complexity surrounding ARMY’s engagement in SCEs, we hope to bring clarity as to whether unique factors within the ARMY fandom lead them to quick and large-scale successes. Furthermore, by contextualizing fans’ perceptions of their community within group literature, we contribute to understanding which team characteristics are prominent in this fandom. Given that fandoms have been gaining traction, growing larger, and showing immense power—and collectives are increasingly forming in similar manners as fandoms—our work may also provide grounding for understanding future online fandoms and communities. --Introduction

As a global fandom on social media, ARMY has been examined as a “tribe” with four dimensions—digital intimacy, non-social sociability, transnational locality, and organizing without an organization. Chang and Park emphasized ARMY as having organizational awareness and valuing teamwork, while also being spontaneous, boundary-less, self-governing, and without any leader. While there is no central coordinating organization within the fandom, ARMY is still successful in coordinating projects and achieving organizational cohesion through a structure in which members propose an action, spread the word, and others “show up” for the cause. --Global fandom and social media

BTS’s values resonate with fans, but are more subtly found in the messages and social commentary within their music, where “messages about youth, dreams, struggle, and self-love [are] easy to relate to and identify with”. A big part of BTS’s appeal is the group’s perceived authenticity in the eyes of fans who strongly connect with the members through shared lived experiences, inspiring them to believe that they too can overcome similar obstacles. ARMY as a whole also work to uphold their own positive image in the eyes of the public and their idols. As fans build up various types of skills, knowledge, distinctions, and vocabulary as a fandom, they recognize the rules of their culture. Because it is common for Korean media to cover news related to K-pop fan communities, ARMY is often found reminding each other that “ARMY are the faces of BTS”. Part of K-pop fandoms’ participatory culture focuses on the responsibility to build their public image. For ARMY, this has led to creating etiquette campaigns that instill “rules of proper public behavior, such as not littering around the [concert] venue, not standing on the spectator seats, and to be polite when other singers perform”. According to Lee, ARMY aims “to be exemplary fans in the image of BTS, who always strive to be wholesome and good influence.” Furthermore, fans’ self-refection and control over their roles and values have also led to the development of policing structures within fandom to ensure that they “actively and positively contribute to the [...] community”. --Group identity, image, and values

The collective efforts shown by ARMY suggest that the fandom often works more as a cohesive group, team, or organization than a simple network of people. Therefore, literature on organizations and teams is pertinent to our study. ARMY is a “purposive group”, having a clear purpose for existing (i.e., to support BTS). Yet defining ARMY as a group, which encompasses “an enormous variety of social forms”, is increasingly ambiguous as membership is nebulous—the composition of the group shifts and sometimes inconspicuously (e.g., online). While it is possible to purchase the official, annual ARMY membership, many BTS fans still identify as ARMY without this membership. Prior to the launch of Weverse,2 fans had to take an exam to be part of the official fan café. Even after the launch of Weverse, the fan café still exists with the same gatekeeping mechanism, while on Weverse, anyone can participate as ARMY. --Fandom as group and team

As ARMY is a community based on a common interest in (and passion for) BTS, we expect their PSOC will be reflected in team psychological safety. Having had multiple successes in collaborative efforts for both BTS-related and -unrelated causes, we expect ARMYs to have a high pre-existing sense of team composition correlated with high team efficacy. We hypothesize #MatchAMillion is a campaign made possible not only because of a love for BTS, but also because of a shared value system of philanthropy. Finally, we expect that ARMYs’ perceived success of #MatchAMillion will show high team cohesion and viability as well as higher team efficacy from this campaign. --Fandom as group and team

We conducted a survey in order to sample the large, diverse, and global ARMY fan community. Comprising free-text, ordinal, and multiple-choice questions, the survey collected basic demographic information and probed three main themes related to our research question. --Survey design

How ARMYs see ARMY. We first wished to garner insights into perception of the ARMY fandom by its members. Participants delivered descriptions of how they view ARMY, and elaborated on confidence (or lack thereof) in the fandom. Prior pilot interviews revealed variances in how individual ARMYs regarded the fandom—for instance, as an organization or a large team. As we could find no established metrics specifically for fandoms, we considered various metrics with which to characterize ARMY. For organizational culture, particularly the “compliance, motives, leadership, decision making, effectiveness, values and organizational forms”, we referenced the Organizational Culture Assessment Instrument (OCAI). OCAI is itself based on Quinn and Rohrbaugh’s Competing Values framework, whose axes of (1) flexibility and stability, and (2) integration and differentiation are “inherent in any human system”. Inspired by OCAI, we derived four characteristics to describe the following organizational culture types (Figure 1): Clan (flexibility, internal focus) emphasizes discretion, dynamism, and concurrently emphasizes integration and unity; adhocracy (flexibility, external focus) emphasizes innovation and creativity while accommodating change and risk; hierarchy (stability, internal focus) emphasizes control, organization, and efficiency; and market (stability, external focus) emphasizes competition, strategy, and meeting goals. Given ARMY’s ability to mobilize and organize to carry out #MatchAMillion, we also investigated a variety of team metrics referenced from prior literature. --Survey design

ARMYs’ personal involvement in social collaborative efforts. Our second category of questions aimed to assess motivations for joining the BTS fandom, clarify individual ARMYs’ level of involvement in SCEs before and after joining ARMY, and understand the specific nature of their involvement in such efforts.

Fandom involvement in social collaborative efforts. Our final category of questions assessed participation in SCEs—in ARMY and other fandoms—as well as fans’ perceptions of both the organization of ARMY and involvement (individually and collectively) in the #MatchAMillion campaign. Finally, we queried participants on the perceived success of #MatchAMillion, as well as the extent to which success—and awareness there of—influences further participation in ARMY’s SCEs. --Survey design

ARMY Reactions

This paper is amazing. I like how everything is objective and it gives us an overview of the perspective of ARMYs, even calmly talking about internal conflict.

OMG congratulations! So amazing and proud. Thanks to all the co-authors for this amazing accomplishment Partying face A paper of mine as a co-author got accepted in CHI2021 too but imahine getting a paper accepted for BTSxARMY!?!? Dang its so cool. Super elated.

ARMYs

- in the academic sphere - being one with social justice movements - donating to causes - always giving quality content that's helped my MH

I've never been more proud of this fandom. The boys would be so proud too.