Why I created this blog
Hi fellow ARMY members, I’m making this blog in the hopes to help new ARMY members become “encultured” into the fandom. Recently for my English class we were instructed to examine an online community we were a part of and examine the different genres/texts within that community. Obviously, I chose the ARMY and BTS because that’s what I know best. We were then instructed to find a problem within the community and see if we could create a new genre that could help solve the problem.
What I found was that there is sometimes a bias from older ARMY towards newer ARMYs who may not know as much about BTS and the community norms. As such it can be extremely difficult for newer members to truly become apart of the community, and also can create a negative stigma surrounding the community as well. I also found that not only does this discrimination towards new ARMYs make it difficult for them to become apart of the community, but also the sheer volume of posts and content out there about BTS - where should one even begin!?
Additionally, in my English class we were given essays from scholars on the very topic of genres and their impact on communities. One of the scholars we looked at was Kerry Dirk, in her essay she explained that genres interact with members and provides them the “ability to know how to best interact.” Therefore, if members cannot access these genres (i.e. social media posts and group chats specifically) then they cannot become fully immersed. Another scholar, Fishman, explained in her essay that “all aspects of community life rewards uniformity” and therefore allows members to know not only how to interact but to separate members from nonmembers.
As such my solution to this issue was to create a Tumblr blog that would have all the information a new ARMY member might need to know! I think this creates opportunities for new members to become more informed and hopefully find new friends! I understand that being that I am using a social media platform like Tumblr is might still be hard for new fans to find my blog and therefore get the information them need - but I hope this helps and am looking for any feedback that might improve this blog!















