Collaborative Cultural Intermediation and Communitainment Value in the Creator Economy: The Expanding Case of Webtoons

Abstract

A robust web of semi-veiled unpaid cultural intermediation in the South Korean-born Webtooniverse is marking a rapidly shifting ecology of an emergent digital mediasphere. Networks of participatory fans swarming around serialized webtoons are facilitating indirect translation in this webcomic domain in previously understudied ways. Shedding light on this protoindustrial communicative phenomenon, this study investigates some of the nuanced collaboration involved in the Korean fantasy–action superhero webtoon Sidekicks (2014 -) and how its global fans are leveraging convergent technological affordances to generate a new source of communitainment value. An analysis of the indirect translation activities on the Webtoons platform, which is fueling a transnational IP frenzy of its own, demonstrates how this exploited labor is central to a content production and consumption process that challenges current understandings of the creator economy and its participatory culture dynamics.