Social media and the new Korean Wave

The proliferation of studies on Korean television dramas, film and popular music (K-pop) in recent years has generated a robust Korean Wave (Hallyu) scholarship. As research started to exhaust its subject matter, the Wave has transformed from a regional presence to a global phenomenon that manifests remarkable media contra-flows from the peripheries (Thussu, 2007). This geographical expansion of Korean popular culture has reignited interest in the phenomenon which can no longer be explained by concepts such as cultural proximity (Straubhaar, 1991). Scholarly research now focuses on the production, circulation, reception and consumption of Hallyu on a global scale. In particular, the role of social media in the Wave’s transnationalizing process is intriguing. This transformation constitutes the main theme of two new books: Dal Yong Jin’s New Korean wave: Transnational cultural power in the age of the social media (2016, hereafter New Korean Wave) and Sangjoon Lee and Abé Mark Nornes’ edited anthology Hallyu 2.0: The Korean Wave in the age of the social media (2015, hereafter Hallyu 2.0). As evidenced by their titles, both books discuss the Korean Wave in relation to social media.

What has changed, when, how and why? In the New Korean Wave, Jin usefully compares what he calls Hallyu 1.0 (1997–2007) and 2.0 (2008–present). These two periods are not merely divided by the directions of transnational flows. After all, the export of Korean cultural products surpassed their import in 2008. More importantly, as Jin argues, they differ in terms of primary genres (TV dramas vs K-pop, video games and animation), technologies (online game vs social media and digital games), major regions (East Asia vs Asia, Europe and North America), primary consumers (people in their 30s–40s vs also teens-20s) and major cultural policies (hands-off policies to hands-on policy). Among them, the shift in primary genres is the most obvious.

We can observe this shift based on the trend of academic publishing. The first book on the Korean Wave written in English (Chua and Iwabuchi, 2008) was released in 2008. This anthology dealt exclusively with the spread of Korean television dramas in East and Southeast Asia. Yet this was also around the time when the genre seemed to lose its appeal for foreign audiences; according to Jin, the proportion of dramas in Korean television export peaked in 2008. Unexpectedly, K-pop’s increasing popularity at the time reignited the Korean fever and promoted it to the global stage, especially in 2012 when Psy’s YouTube sensation Gangnam Style swept the world. Riding on this momentum, books published later tended to focus on various K-pop issues, such as the state’s exercise of soft power, the music industry, the Internet, fan culture, and representations of gender and sexuality (Kim, 2013; Kuwahara, 2014).

Despite the global visibility of K-pop, Jin argues that Hallyu 2.0 is composed of a range of media and digital industries beyond popular culture. The New Korean Wave book provides a comprehensive review of six industries, including television, film, animation, K-pop, digital games and smartphones. The addition of the smartphone industry, normally neglected by media scholars, is unusual, highlighting the new Korean Wave’s spillover to information technologies. Putting it more precisely, as Jin argues, one significant characteristic of Hallyu 2.0 is the integration of information and communication technology (ICT) and cultural content in its production, circulation and consumption. The key player facilitating this process of integration is the Korean state, which has exponentially increased its budget for the promotion of cultural industries from the 1990s to the present. During this period, the policy target of cultural industries has shifted from arts to popular culture to so-called ‘creative content’. Therefore, Jin devotes a chapter detailing the change of Korean cultural policy in light of neoliberal globalization in the past two decades.

The New Korean Wave stands out as a comprehensive book, documenting the transnationalization of Korean media and digital industries. As one of the most productive scholars on Hallyu, Jin commands the approaches of political economy and cultural studies to investigate diverse industries. He details the historical context and global expansion of each industry based on rich quantitative data. Especially innovative is the chapter on television, which traces the industry’s transformation from the export of dramas to selling format copyright of dramas, reality shows and quiz shows. This new but understudied development has significant implications for recent Korean media flows. In addition to reviewing the development of various industries, Jin’s ambition is to situate the Korean Wave in the global–local debate, with a theoretical effort of ‘politicizing hybridization theory’ (p. 11). Thus, the investigation of each industry also contains a textual analysis of selected products created by the industry. This integrated approach allows Jin to conclude that ‘transnational cultural power’ remains uneven in the Hallyu phenomenon. As he argues, regardless of the tremendous contra-flow, the Korean Wave did not alter the global cultural relations between the West and the East because it fails to generate what Homi K. Bhabha (1994) called ‘third space’ in its content from the process of hybridization.

Jin’s critique contradicts Ryoo’s (2009: 147) perspective that the Korean Wave exemplifies local cultural agents’ negotiation with global forms, ‘using them as resources through which Asian people construct their own cultural spaces’. This two opposite positions raise the question of to what extent cultural hybridization is creative enough to represent local concerns and identity and thus to alter the global–local relations. For example, the hybridization of K-pop is characterized by its uniformity in visual and vocal presentation (see Roald Maliangkay’s chapter in Hallyu 2.0) under the coproduction of US and Korean music industry (see Jin’s discussion in chapter 6 of New Korean Wave). As K-pop has become a globally recognizable genre, should we consider it a copycat of the West or a unique brand of its own? To resolve the contradiction, it may be better to treat the global–local nexus in a continuum rather than dichotomous forces to examine this power relationship. Alongside the issue of hybridization, some contextual elements that are crucial to the book’s distinction between Hallyu 1.0 and 2.0, particularly government policy and social media, seem not to apply to the analysis of some industries. The lack of elaboration on social media may result from the fact that social media are not equally important to different Korean media sectors. K-pop, with its visual presentation and memorable lyrics, benefits most from social media for its global spread. In recent years, Korean television dramas have also shifted their promotion and circulation to social media. These two genres are the focus of the second book Hallyu 2.0, which explores the role of social media in each case study.

Despite the Hallyu 2.0 book’s focus on K-pop and television dramas, as JungBong Choi (2015: 32) argues in chapter 1, ‘it would be a flagrant mistake to nail Hallyu down to a “cultural” matter in its narrowest sense’. As he sees it, Hallyu has evolved ‘tirelessly traversing other cultural domains’ (p. 32). He develops a concentric model to explain the components of the new Korean Wave, ranging from essential content (e.g. television dramas and K-pop) to semi-essential content (e.g. videogame and food), para-Hallyu products and services (e.g. tourism, cosmetic products, plastic surgery, fashion items and language services), distribution channels (various communication technologies) and effects (sales of commodities and national image, etc.). Therefore, Choi’s definition of Hallyu is much broader than Jin’s. Furthermore, he contends that the expanding boundaries of Hallyu should not only be explained by ‘the state-corporate-media intervention’ (p. 48), but also by the cultural production of overseas fans which is undertaken with the help of the social media.

Therefore, Choi argues that the new Korean Wave should be understood through both production and consumption. He coins the term Hallyu-hwa (literally Hallyu-ize) to highlight the strong will of both sides to promote the Korean Wave. Particularly important is the national-institutional campaign to raise South Korea’s cultural prestige on the global stage by using the template of popular culture. The idea of Hallyu-hwa is not innovative, since issues concerning soft power and cultural nationalism associated with the Korean Wave have been explored earlier (Cho, 2011; Joo, 2011; Nye and Kim, 2013; Walsh, 2014). Still this concept vividly captures the ethos of the Korean Wave, which emerged accidentally but has become a model of nation branding that is particularly successful in the era of media convergence. Or to rephrase Choi’s words, the Wave manifests the Korean nation’s ‘profound will to power’ (p. 49). This aspect is also emphasized in Jin’s New Korean Wave.

On the other side of Hallyu-hwa is the power of fans at home and abroad, whose zeal, as Choi argues, makes them protagonists and a vital force for the construction of Hallyu. Social media become an interactive platform for these cultural agents to ‘redesign the productive and distributive patterns for what was initially offered to them’ (p. 42). This is particularly true of the global expansion of K-pop, which owes a lot to the fans’ creative performances and collective actions enabled by social media, such as flash mobs and cover dances (see Eun-Young Jung’s chapter). In the television industry, social media strengthens drama’s ‘last-minute live filming’ practice (script changes according to audiences’ feedback) and increases the interactivity between producers and consumers (see Youjeong Oh’s chapter). As is the case in the United States, video streaming services are replacing traditional television outlets to become the main source of Korean drama consumption. It is worth noticing that this content is largely translated by fansubbers (i.e. translated by fans and not professionals) belonging to various online communities (see Sangjoon Lee’s chapter).

There is more to say about Hallyu fandom beyond the perspective of prosumers, however. Seung-Ah Lee’s chapter Of the Fans, by the Fans, for the Fans provides an exemplary story of fan activism. Lee records the participation of fans in K-pop group JYJ’s legal battle against a ‘slave contract’ with S.M. Entertainment, a Korean music giant. Fans across national borders mobilized spontaneously and organized advertising campaigns, consumer boycotts and legal actions. In the end, they not only helped their idols to win the battle, but also altered the industry infrastructure, especially regarding labor rights. While highlighting fan activism, Lee’s chapter also reveals the operation of K-pop’s somewhat exploitative idol production system. Therefore, it provides a critical understanding by examining a less celebrated, if not darker, side of this industry. Interestingly, this matter seems to be well known to diehard K-pop fans but remains under-researched in academic literature on the subject.

This neglect may reflect the tendency of academic discourse to emphasize Hallyu’s success, with a rhetoric of pride propelled by Korean nationalism, as Abé Mark Nornes argues in the Afterword in the Hallyu 2.0 book. He further questions whether academic interest in Hallyu can be sustained, if the Korean Wave becomes less popular transnationally. This is a rather critical but necessary self-reflection, implying that there is more to explore about the Korean Wave beyond explaining its triumph. For example, the commercialization and commodification of Korean television dramas in the Hallyu 2.0 era is striking, if not stunning. Such hit dramas as My Love from the Star, become not only the object of extensive product placement but also a showcase of Korean fashion or food. The trend echoes Choi’s concentric model, demonstrating that the Korean Wave has crossed from essential content to other cultural domains. Yet the relationships between different domains at various levels remain scarcely explored. In addition to commercialization, the Korean television industry has adapted to the new media environment in order to expand its overseas market. For instance, the Korean television station SBS synchronically broadcast the shows My Love from the Star (2013–2014) and Descendants of the Sun (2016) on its domestic television channel and on the Chinese video streaming platform iQiyi, owned by Baidu, to the Chinese audience. (This cooperation, despite its success, was interrupted in the end of 2016 when China placed a ban on Korean businesses.) These new developments of Korean dramas in Hallyu 2.0 remain less explored.

Still, Hallyu 2.0 comprises several interesting and solid case studies that provide a nuanced analysis of K-pop and Korean television dramas. It is, along with New Korean Wave, a valuable text for students hoping to understand the new configuration of the Korean Wave. Yet, after reading these two books, readers may not fully understand why, compared to other countries, it is Korea that excels in the age of social media. To generate a more thorough explanation, the field requires more ethnographic and political economic studies that reveal the Korean cultural industries’ global strategies from within, in addition to the textual and policy analysis approaches adopted by the two reviewed books. As Hallyu scholarship grows and becomes an established field of study, it can make an important contribution to theory-building around the current dynamics of globalization/anti-globalization from a Korean perspective.