Yue Liang

What does it mean to “feel close” in a world where intimacy is increasingly mediated by digital platforms, monetized through pop culture, and shaped by unequal infrastructures of access? My dissertation examines the commodification of digital intimacy and the informal economies surrounding K-pop “video fancalls”: two-minute video chats between idols and fans emerging during the COVID-19 pandemic as replacements for in-person fan-signs to boost album sales. While framed as intimate and interactive, access to fancalls is tightly regulated through competitive purchases and platform affordances. Surrounding these events is a layered informal economy where “fancall consultants”, proxy services, and album resellers shape fans’ experiences and possibilities of connection. Tracing the transnational circuits of affect, money, albums, and labor, I ask: how do fans navigate, interpret, and enact digital intimacy in this structured yet affectively charged system? What forms of informal labor and infrastructures sustain this economy ? And what does this reveal about broader, layered exploitations in the K-pop market driven by hyper-consumption? Centering non-elite fans and informal workers in multi-sited fieldwork, this research theorizes how people across borders seek meaning, recognition, and care in hyper-mediated economies of closeness, and contributes to anthropological understandings of emotion, infrastructure, and transnational digital economies.