AlDub you, Ma-Alden kita: The online behavior and consumption of the AlDub fandom
ABSTRACT
Mojica, S. J. D. (2017). AlDub you, Ma-Alden kita: The online behavior and consumption of the AlDub fandom. Unpublished Undergraduate Thesis, University of the Philippines, College of Mass Communication.
The study examines how celebrity loveteam fans utilize social media to show support for a loveteam. It specifically examines how the AlDub (Alden Richards and Maine “Yaya Dub” Mendoza) fandom utilizes Twitter to express their fandom and how such expressions affect the fandom. Using John Fiske’s cultural economy of fandom, I explore how fandom utilizes social media and how they derive meanings out of the expressions that they create. In connection with this, using Henry Jenkins’ participatory culture framework, I dissect and elaborate on how the practices of AlDub fans on Twitter affect their consumption and production within the fandom culture. In order to approach the objectives of the study, I observe Twitter trends and the textual analysis of tweets. The hashtag trends are chosen according to the recorded highest number of tweets that were generated by the fans who use Twitter. This method is also supplemented by in-depth semi-structured interviews with selected informants to further describe the space and identity that fans create on Twitter. This encourages an informant to further elaborate on the information that may lead to the generation of more data that may be explored later on.
Keywords: AlDub, fandom, social media, internet, fans, participatory culture, Twitter