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This article traces the formation of popular music idol industries in China and the emergence of data fandom. It charts the growth of digital platforms and historicizes the commercial and geopolitical itinerations linking cultural production in Japan, South Korea, and China. It locates data fandom as an integral part of the popular music industries reconfigured by digital social media platforms; a structural change from the production-to-consumption 'supply chain' model of the recording era towards emergent circuits of content that integrate industries and audiences. Data fans understand how their online activities are tracked, and adopt individual and collective strategies to influence metric and semantic information reported on digital platforms and social media. This article analyses how the practices of data fans impact upon charts, media and content traffic, illustrating how this activity benefits the idols they are following, and enhances a fan's sense of achievement and agency. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper argues that the new forms of communication have had a major impact on gender and sexual ideologies and practices across East Asia. In particular, it focuses on the impact that the new media had on Chinese masculinities in the post-Mao years, a period that coincided with the “Asian economic miracle” and the rise of China. This was also the time when women's studies became well established in the West and men's studies was becoming increasingly prominent in the academic arena. But throughout this time, research into Asian men has been very limited, although Asian women have been voluminously described, analyzed, and publicized. Men's studies scholars such as R. W. Connell were well aware that a large proportion of the world's men did not receive any attention in gender studies and that this neglect was a serious problem in the field. In the first article in the inaugural issue of Men and Masculinities, he called for a more global understanding of the world gender order (Connell 1998). [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]