Theoretical Framework The researcher will use Roland Barthes’ Semiotics, Arjun Appadurai’s Global Cultural Transnational flow, and Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities to establish the displacement of the K-pop fandom culture through the K-pop fans symbolic interaction in a computer-mediated setting. This symbolic interaction existing in the online space led the formation of an imagined virtual community of the K-pop fandom.
Semiotics
Swiss Linguist Ferdinand de Saussure introduced the idea of Semiotics or Semiology. Semiotics defined a sign as “the combination of a signifier and a signified” (Saussure as cited in Griffin 2012, 340). From Saussure’s idea, linguists began to develop new theories of signs, including Charles Saunders Pierce’s triadic model of the sign and Roland Barthes’ sign system. Pierce’s semiotics focused on the triadic model of the sign where he described a sign as anything that represents an object in the mind of the interpreter (Littlejohn & Foss, 2008, 35). Meanwhile, Roland Barthes defined semiotics as “the study of the social production of meaning from sign systems” stating that the signs are “anything that can stand for something else” (Barthes as cited in Griffin, 2012, 332). Anything can be a sign, as long as it can be interpreted as something else. People unconsciously associate signs to different systems of conventions existing in one’s culture. These systems of conventions related to signs vary depending on an individual’s