The rapid growth of the Korean online game industry, viewed in social, cultural, and economic contexts. In South Korea, online gaming is a cultural phenomenon. Games are broadcast on television, professional gamers are celebrities, and youth culture is often identified with online gaming. Uniquely in the online games market, Korea not only dominates the local market but has also made its mark globally. In Korea's Online Gaming Empire, Dal Yong Jin examines the rapid growth of this industry from a political economy perspective, discussing it in social, cultural, and economic terms. Korea has the largest percentage of broadband subscribers of any country in the world, and Koreans spend increasing amounts of time and money on Internet-based games. Online gaming has become a mode of socializing—a channel for human relationships. The Korean online game industry has been a pioneer in software development and eSports (electronic sports and leagues). Jin discusses the policies of the Korean government that encouraged the development of online gaming both as a cutting-edge business and as a cultural touchstone; the impact of economic globalization; the relationship between online games and Korean society; and the future of the industry. He examines the rise of Korean online games in the global marketplace, the emergence of eSport as a youth culture phenomenon, the working conditions of professional gamers, the role of game fans as consumers, how Korea's local online game industry has become global, and whether these emerging firms have challenged the West's dominance in global markets.

While it has been more than 15 years since the Korean pop culture phenomenon known as the Korean wave or hallyu emerged, academic analyses have not sufficiently addressed its dimension as a media environment from a global perspective. In this regard, drawing on qualitative interviews with North American fans of the recent Korean wave, this study explores how the hallyu phenomenon is integrated into a social media-driven cultural landscape, which will be referred to as the social mediascape. The social mediascape of hallyu reveals that the technological affordances of social media platforms and fans' sociality interplay with each other, resulting in the rapid spread of hallyu as a set of impure cultural forms.

Abstract:In the early 21 st century, platforms, known as digital media intermediaries, have greatly influenced people's daily lives. Due to the importance of platforms for the digital economy and culture, including intellectual property and participatory culture, several countries have developed their own social network sites and Web portals. Nonetheless, a handful of Western countries, primarily the U.S., have dominated the global platform market and society. This paper aims to historicize the concept of imperialism in the globalized 21 st century. It investigates whether the recent growth of American-based platforms has resulted in a change to the fundamental idea of the imperialism thesis by analyzing the evolutionary nature of imperialism towards platform imperialism. It then addresses whether we are experiencing a new notion of imperialism by mapping out several core characteristics that define platform imperialism, including the swift growth and global dominance of SNSs and smartphones. It pays close attention to the capitalization of platforms and their global expansion, including the major role of intellectual property rights as the most significant form of capital accumulation in the digital age. It eventually endeavors to make a contribution to the platform imperialism discourse as a form of new imperialism, focusing on the nexus of great powers.

The Korean film business has witnessed a swift and steady growth in the production of, and audiences for, domestic films over the past several years. This article attempts to clarify the cause of these changes and goes on to discuss the Korean film industry with a special focus on state cultural policy. The article then explicates the impact of the changing cultural policy on the film business by examining the influx of domestic capital into the film industry. It also analyzes the impact of neoliberal cultural policies on the transnationalization of the Korea film industry. Finally, it discusses whether changing cultural policies have maintained or developed cultural identity, such as Korean traditions and nationalism, in domestic films.

This article has examined how the Hallyu phenomenon is integrated into a transnational global cultural landscape, focusing on Chilean reception of K-pop. It analyzed how Hallyu fans engage with a social media-saturated environment in Chile, mapping out transnational pop cultural flows within the digital media environment through which the participatory culture of media users is spread. What is interesting is that Chilean society, in general, shows negative attitudes toward K-pop fans. More importantly, while many Chileans consider K-pop fans weird and strange, often disparaging their family members and friends for liking such music, the marginalization of K-pop fans in Chile promotes a greater sense of bonding among them through the affinity spaces of social media. Under this circumstance, most of our interviewees explained that digital media plays a vital role in the dissemination of K-pop in Chile and Latin America. Unlike Hallyu fans in other regions, K-pop fans in Chile have developed cultural intimacy specific to digital site-media, primarily in the realm of social media, and K-pop generates the creation of affinity spaces via different social media platforms.