Discourse community of K-Pop fans spazzing in Twitter

ABSTRACT

Discourse community is a group of people who shares the same goals or has common interests and use of language to achieve it. By the growth of K-pop wave and technology in the last decade, K-pop fans community in Twitter appears as one of discourse community. This research focuses to analyze the characteristics of K-pop fans community through the discourse community that states by Swales (1990).

This research aims to know the characteristics of K-pop fans community in Twitter based on discourse community theory. This research applies qualitative design because it does not measure the attributes of a thing or phenomenon. The data source of this research is taken from three accounts of K-pop fans in Twitter: @_xiujiaa, @luhanpls, and @notoriouswag. The researcher use human instrument as the reseach instrument because there is no other instrument that can obtain the data. There were three steps to analyze the data. First step is the researcher read all the tweets from a K-poppers and mark tweets according to the context. Second, the researcher sorts tweets that related to the theoretical formulation of the Swales’ theories. Third, the researcher systematically examines the data based on the research problem and resolves it.

After analyzing the data, the researcher found the six characteristics of K- pop fans community in Twitter based on Swales’s theory: (1) goals of K-pop fans community are to praise and spazz over the idols. They are praise and spazz over the idol through using netlingo and netspeak language such as the use of abbreviation, emoticon, and minimal use of punctuation. (2) Mechanism of communication among the members of community is use the Twitter as the media of communication. (3) K-pop fans community uses their participatory mechanism primarily to provide information and feedback by discussing the current issue of their idols in form of tweeting and replying tweet. (4) K-pop fans community use five genres in their communication, the genres are: personal spazzing tweet, conversational tweets with the other users, retweeting from other users, using Twitpic or linking picture, and linking video URL. (5) Specific lexis which is used dividing into three categories: technical terms, common words used in special way, and community specific abbreviations and acronyms. The technical terms are used by K-pop fans community is the Romanization of Korean such as
애교 spelled into aegyo. Then, for the common words used in special ways the researcher found some words such as; showcase, fancafe, and bias. For the community specific abbreviations and acronyms are OT12 and selca. (6) The membership of community can change due to the attendance of participant or the members of community excluded in conventional way by the members of community.

Based on the findings, the researcher suggests to the reader and the next researcher who wants to do a research on discourse community make this study as reference. The further researcher can find the reason of the use language in the specific way in discourse community field.