"To be that one other brick in the pillar": Online Communities, Platforms, and Collective Action in the BTS Industrial Complex

Social media platforms have become integral to everyday life and serve as the foundation for online communities. These platforms not only enable communication but also shape the ways in which online communities are formed and maintained. In this paper, we examine an online community, the BTS fandom ARMY, using Durkheim’s concept of solidarity, we show how ARMY’s symbolic commitments, collective labor, and boundary negotiations are simultaneously community practices and infrastructural labor that generate cultural and economic value. Using an online survey and ethnographic observations of BTS ARMY, we present the BTS Industrial Complex, an ecosystem of communities all related to BTS that rely on digital platforms to influence and interact with each other. Our contributions are threefold: (1) a conceptualization of the BTS Industrial Complex as a sociotechnical ecosystem, (2) empirical insights into how platforms shape collective action, and (3) implications for HCI in designing for and critically examining large-scale cultural economies.