This paper examines the global circulation of K-pop Random Play Dance and other public fan-covered dance videos as a digital media phenomenon that is fundamentally grounded in physical spatial practices. While K-pop fans’ dance practices are often viewed as a viral genre of fan performance shared across platforms worldwide such as YouTube, Instagram, Douyin, TikTok, and Bilibili, we argue that the digital visibility of these events inherently relies on the embodied negotiation of physical space. Drawing on Lefebvre's triadic theory of space (conceived, perceived, and lived), we analyze how urban landscapes, platform affordances, and choreographed fan practices interact to produce the necessary conditions for digital circulation. Through multi-sited ethnographic fieldwork and interviews conducted across China, Australia, and the United States, we show how fans engage in sophisticated spatial labor and tactically reshape spaces. In tracing the labor behind the screen, we offer a spatialized account of digital media which foregrounds how digital visibility is not only structured by algorithms and interfaces, but continually co-produced through bodily movement, infrastructural constraints, and affective investments in the material world, informing a more situated, embodied, and relational understanding of what digital space is and how it comes to matter.
Yang et al. (Wed,) studied this question.