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Local Fans of Global Sporting Events: Exploring an Online Community of Korean Major League Baseball Fans during the World Baseball Classic
Sun, November 18, 8:00 to 9:15am, Chicago Hilton, Floor: Eighth Floor, Lake ErieAbstract
This study aims at exploring how the local fans respond to, consume or even appropriate a global sporting event: it will examine South Korean Major League Baseball [MLB] fans and their online community. Especially, the first international baseball event, the World Baseball Classic [WBC], which was organized by the MLB bureau and held in March 2006, provides a wonderful case in which we can analyze and interpret diverse and even contradictory responses of the local fans of the global sports. As a way of investing the complexity between global sports events and local fans, I will conduct ethnography on an online community and its fans in South Korea. I suggest that an ethnographic approach is the most useful for explaining the cultural phenomena surrounding an online community and observing daily practices of the local baseball fans in it.
This study begins both with providing a theoretical frame regarding the globalizing sports events and with tracing my experience of deciding to use an online community as a research subject. Then, I analyze the responses and interactions among Korean MLB fans in their online community with focus on the World Baseball Classic [WBC] as an exemplary case in which national desires are complicatedly collided with a global strategy. In the WBC, Korean MLB fans were not only fascinated with watching performances of MLB players with different national teams, but also thrilled with the consecutive victories of South Korean national teams. To conclude, MLB fandom in South Korea might be regarded as a result of interactions between the global and the local. Nonetheless, Korean fans ways of enjoying MLB goes beyond a simple dichotomy between the global and the local. I suggest the multiplicity of the Korean Fans desires over the WBC gives us a hint of explaining multifaceted natures vis-à-vis local consumption of the global commodity.