The social mediascape of transnational Korean pop culture: Hallyu 2.0 as spreadable media practice

Abstract

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.

Identity Constructions of Indonesian Moslem Youth Through Fan Fiction

“…In the late 1990s, a few Korean TV dramas (K-dramas hereafter), such as What is Love All About? (Sarangi Mwŏgillae, 1997) and Stars in My Heart (Pyŏrŭn Naegasŭme, 1997), became popular in East and Southeast Asia and provided a wide range of Asian audiences with glimpses of Korean pop culture [5].…”

“…The emergence of internet enable people around the world to have experience of knowing and even loving the cultural product of South Korea. The fans in the present study were immersed in the social media scape through which the hallyu content was increasingly available and spreadable [5].…”

Understanding Contraflow Pop-Culture Tourism: The Case of Transnational Fandom of South Korean Pop-Culture and the “Hallyu” Tourism

“…South Korea has uniquely added one more case to the contraflow of popculture as the Korean pop-culture has been rapidly grown in global markets (Jin & Yoon, 2016). The Hallyu phenomenon shows a new pattern of pop-cultural flow that is triggered by global fandom stemmed from a new digital space.…”

Predicting Popularity of Korean Contents in Arab Countries Using a Data Mining Technique

“…The existing literatures on the Korean Wave focus their attention on the Asian market and tend to still define it primarily as an intra-Asian flow of particular forms of content without sufficiently addressing its dimension of social media and its technology and effect on Korean Wave from a global perspective (Jin and Yoon, 2016). Thus, it look over how a wide range of Western, Middle Eastern and African fans of Korean pop culture engage with social media and are networked with other fans (Jin and Yoon, 2016). …”