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.

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Hallyu (the Korean wave) is an intriguing phenomenon originating from Korea and refers to the current impact of products of South Korean popular culture (especially for music, K-pop). K-pop, a representative product of the Korean Wave, is a multi-layered formation that is composed of hybrid cultural practices and a diverse range of lived experiences. Nowadays, much social and academic attention is being paid to the reason for the success of K-pop. This study deals with how the Korean traditional gwangdae (scaramouche or clown) culture has been passed down to develop into K-pop. For this, diachronic perspectives are applied to analyze the formation and development of gwangdae culture and K-pop; and the cultural hybridity theories are used in explaining the succession of gwangdae spirit to K-pop culture. As a result, this study examines how and what kinds of changes and innovations Korean gwangdae culture has gone through to accumulate, pass down and develop the gwangdae's artistic and cultural capabilities, living up to the demands of the times, since earlier times. Thus, this study tries to understand the meaning through traditional interpretation and reflections on K-pop and also makes specific policy recommendations to accompany the analysis. In particular, we tried to present the direction of the new K-pop strategy based on the gwangdae spirit.