<![CDATA[The rapid development of social media has encouraged the emergence of various digital cultural practices within virtual communities, including K-Pop fandoms that utilize social media as a space for communication and interaction. One of these communities is the Carat fandom on the TikTok account @seventeen17_official. This study aims to analyze the digital cultural practices of the Carat community on the @seventeen17_official TikTok account from the perspective of participatory culture. This research employed a qualitative approach using the netnographic method. Data were collected through non-participant observation, documentation, and literature review of interactions in the comment sections of the 15 posts with the highest engagement between January and December 2025. The data were analyzed using the Miles, Huberman, and Saldaña model, which consists of data reduction, data display, and conclusion drawing. The findings indicate that the digital cultural practices of the Carat community reflect the five characteristics of participatory culture: relatively low barriers to participation, strong support for creating and sharing contributions, informal mentorship, members’ belief that their contributions matter, and members’ sense of social connection with one another. These findings suggest that TikTok’s comment section functions not only as a space for responding to content but also as a communicative space where fans collectively construct, maintain, and reproduce digital culture. Keywords: digital culture; participatory culture; Carat; TikTok; netnography.]]>
Copyrights © 2026
