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.

Keywords

Impure culture Korean pop culture Korean wave (hallyu)participatory culture social media spreadable media

Introduction

The Korean Entertainment 10th Anniversary Awards ceremony was held in the city of Chiba, Japan, on 19 October 2013. This event, for which the award recipients were chosen based solely on the public voting of 420,000 people (Korea Creative Content Agency, 2013), proved the decade-long popularity of Korean pop culture, which is also known as the Korean wave or hallyu. While the hallyu phenomenon has been evident in the East and Southeast Asian regions since the late 1990s, it has recently been observed in other regions as well. For example, the Korean popular music (K-pop hereafter) concert held at Le Zenith de Paris on 10 June 2011 was in such high demand that 6,000 tickets were sold out in 15 minutes, and an additional concert had to be scheduled due to street rallies and the demands of hundreds of French fans who were unable to purchase tickets (Chung, 2013). South America has witnessed the growing popularity of hallyu, as exemplified by K-pop boy band Super Junior’s 2013 concert in Lima, Peru, which was attended by 13,000 fans (Trivedi, 2013). These examples appear to confirm what journalist Sam Lansky (2012) has called the “hallyu tsunami,” which features the global rise of Korean pop culture fandom beyond the East and Southeast Asian regions.

It has been more than 15 years since hallyu emerged as a transnational cultural phenomenon—first in China and Japan and then across the globe. 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. The initial Korean wave was followed by the megahits of three K-dramas—Autumn Fairy Tale (Kaŭltonghwa, 2000), Winter Sonata (Kyŏul Yŏn’ga, 2002), and Dae Jang Geum (Taechanggŭm, 2003)—in Japan, Thailand, Singapore, and Hong Kong between 2002 and 2006. In the early 2000s, hallyu was also led by the success of K-pop artists, such as BoA, Big Bang, and Dong Bang Shin Ki, in several Asian countries. In recent years, K-pop fandom has been evident even outside of Asia (Hong-Mercier, 2013; Lansky, 2012).

Of course, the Korean wave has not been devoid of challenges. The anti-Korean wave phenomenon has emerged in response to the rise of Korean pop culture, especially in Japan, China, and Taiwan, over the past several years (Hwang, 2011; Lee, 2009).¹ However, the Korean wave has not faded away despite these challenges; rather, it has been enhanced in recent years. Compared to the earlier wave, this new phase of the Korean wave in the 2010s, referred to as “hallyu 2.0” (Nornes and Lee, in press) or the “new Korean wave” (Jin, 2014), appears to be more intensive in its popularity and extensive in its dissemination. First, hallyu 2.0 is defined by its genre, as some researchers equate hallyu 2.0 with the penetration of K-pop in the Western markets in tandem with the creation of K-pop fandom (Song and Jang, 2013). Some critics attribute the new Korean wave to more than one genre, including digital content (e.g. K-pop and online games) and gadgets (e.g. smartphones) (Kim, 2013). Second, hallyu 2.0 is characterized by the significant role of social media in media production and consumption (Jung and Shim, 2013; Oh and Park, 2012). Third, hallyu 2.0 is distinguished from the earlier wave by its global reach (Hong-Mercier, 2013; Jin, in press), as exemplified by the increasing number of North American audiences of hallyu content.²

As such, the new phase of hallyu requires a multidimensional and multidirectional approach to transnational cultural flows (Ono and Kwon, 2013). However, the existing literature on the Korean wave tends to still define it primarily as an intra-Asian flow of particular forms of content without sufficiently addressing its dimension of media technology or media environment from a global perspective. Thus, it overlooks how a wide range of Western fans of Korean pop culture engage with media as technology and are networked with other fans. In this respect, this article aims to explore the ways in which the hallyu phenomenon is integrated into a social media-driven cultural landscape, which will be referred to as the social mediascape. While the notion of mediascape, coined by Appadurai (1990), addresses the images of the world shaped by the global distribution of media, the social mediascape here refers to the mediated space enhanced by the global distribution of social media. In this article, our definition of social media refers to media forms in which the participatory culture of “ordinary” users is facilitated (Murthy, 2012). While pointing to social networking sites (e.g. Facebook), user-driven online platforms (e.g. YouTube and Instagram), and microblogs (e.g. Twitter), the term also addresses those media forms’ interactive processes that enable massive participants to productively collaborate. Social media, therefore, indicate a shift from the model of the rather static Internet web page toward a social web model by means of which the possibilities of users interacting with the web have multiplied, eventually facilitating sociality (Terranova and Donovan, 2013: 297).

Drawing on qualitative interviews with North American fans of Korean pop culture, this study examines how hallyu fans engage with a social media-saturated environment. In comparison to the existing cultural analyses of the Korean wave, which focus, at best, on the content of particular genres or texts and their consumption, we map out transnational pop cultural flows with reference to the media environment through which the participatory culture of media users is spread (Jenkins et al., 2013). Thus, while being aware of the increasing importance of social media in fan culture across the globe (Jenkins et al., 2013), the present study empirically explores why the social mediascape of Korean pop cultural flows uniquely contributes to an enhanced understanding of the transnational new media culture.

Literature review: Institutional and user-oriented analyses of hallyu

In response to the emergence of the Korean wave, media researchers have increasingly examined the phenomenon as a new tendency in transnational mediascape throughout the first decade of the 21st century in the hope that the phenomenon can offer an alternative model to the dominant theorization of media globalization, which has focused on how the Western media affects the national media (Thussu, 2007: 4). Some scholars have defined hallyu as a signal of a contraflow in the Western-dominant global flow of media (e.g. Chua and Iwabuchi, 2008; Kim, 2007; Ryoo, 2009; Shim, 2006). For instance, Kim (2007) finds “de-centralising multiplicity” in the Korean wave phenomenon, which provides “a way to counter the threat and insensibility of the Western-dominated media market” (p. 149). In a similar vein, Ryoo (2009) claims that “the Korean wave is a first sign of how a country ‘in between’ can find a niche and reposition itself as an influential cultural mediator and creator in the midst of global cultural transformation” (p. 147). The emphasis on the de-Westernizing effects of the Korean wave has often been accompanied by the cultural hybridization thesis, which addresses the subversive potential of the media forms situated in between the West and the local (e.g. Ryoo, 2009).

Against this backdrop, media studies’ efforts to define the hallyu phenomenon have entailed debates about why Korean pop culture has recently appealed to global audiences. In particular, recent empirical studies have identified several common reasons behind the sudden surge of hallyu across Asia: family-oriented Confucian values (Lee and Ju, 2010; Sung, 2013), the Asian mode of modernity (Kim, 2005; Leung, 2008), and/or Korea’s soft power (Kim, 2007; Kim and Nye, 2013). Despite the flourishing debates about the characteristics of hallyu content and forms, it is only fairly recently that the contexts of hallyu have come into focus (Sohn, 2012). In particular, there is a lack of empirical studies addressing social media as a key context of hallyu.

The studies examining social media, rather than content, in regard to the hallyu phenomenon are still few in number, yet they can be categorized into two streams of research. One group of studies examines how social media are involved in the Korean wave by observing the media industries’ strategies toward global and intra-Asian markets. This approach, which explores the top-down process initiated by entertainment corporations, can be referred to as an institutional analysis (Ahn et al., 2013; Oh and Lee, 2013; Oh and Park, 2012). These studies have related to the way in which the Korean wave is emerging from above with reference to the technological mediation of Korean wave content on the Internet, in which Korean entertainment industries, social media platforms, and global fandoms interplay with each other (Ono and Kwon, 2013: 200). Ahn et al. (2013) examine how the three major Korean entertainment agencies—YG Entertainment, SM Entertainment, and JYP Entertainment—have increasingly appropriated social media. Their analysis of the presence of Korean pop culture on YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter shows that the Korean entertainment industry strategically adopts social media by maximizing social media channels, leading users to promotions and events and stimulating them with exclusive content. Such strategic use of social media has been further addressed in Oh and Park’s (2012) study, in which K-pop’s increasing presence on YouTube is seen as a result of the Korean entertainment industry’s efforts to achieve global reach, through which K-pop producers have extensively released their music videos and songs on YouTube with minimal royalty fees. Oh and Park (2012) find that the K-pop producers and marketers no longer focus on an audience-based market but increasingly attend to a social media-dependent market while expecting royalty incomes not directly from the viewers but from YouTube, which charges multinational enterprises fees for their advertisements shown prior to the free music videos. These institutional analyses empirically prove the increasing role of media convergence in the transnational flow of Korean pop cultures. However, they do not sufficiently address how global audiences are participating in the media environment.

In this respect, the studies by Jung (2011) and Jung and Shim (2013) pay due attention to the technological distribution and media users of the hallyu 2.0 phenomenon. This group of empirical studies, which can be called a user analysis, addresses how users participate in, and negotiate with, the social media-driven technological mediation of Korean popular culture in Asia. In her study of Indonesian fans of K-pop, Jung (2011) points out common fan practices enhanced by social media—the collaborative recreation and redistribution of original texts, as evidenced in cover dance performances and fan fiction writing. A more nuanced user analysis of hallyu is offered by Jung and Shim (2013), who explore K-pop fandom in Indonesia as an articulation between corporate-controlled media processes and fandom-led grassroots practices.

The aforementioned studies—institutional and user analyses—attempt to explore the role of digital technology in the hallyu phenomenon, which still remains under-researched. However, with the exception of the research by Jung and Shim (2013), the studies tend to focus on either an institutional or user-oriented perspective without fully considering their conjunction. In order to move beyond the binary opposition, Jenkins et al.’s (2013) media circulation model, titled spreadable media, provides an effective conceptual means. They claim that “top-down and bottom-up forces determine how material is shared across and among cultures in far more participatory (and messier) ways” in today’s digital media environment (Jenkins et al., 2013: 1). This model pays due attention to “the role of the active circulation of various grassroots agents” in emerging digital participatory cultures (Jenkins et al., 2013: 15). However, the spreadable media thesis is open to criticism in that it appears to overlook the probable limitations of the media-driven participatory culture. For instance, Jenkins et al. (2013) fail to explain how corporations’ ownership of social media platforms (Fuchs, 2014: 55–57) or biased technological design can adversely affect participatory culture (Pariser, 2011). Based on our awareness of these limitations, we, therefore, critically engage with the notion of spreadable media to shed light on our current debates regarding the role of social media in disseminating Korean pop culture, especially in North America.

Research methods

To explore how North American youth engages with the circulation of Korean pop culture content, qualitative interviews were conducted with 35 young people (13 males and 22 females) who self-identified as Korean pop culture fans between February and May of 2014. While their preferred genres varied, the respondents had been enjoying Korean pop culture for 2–5 years, with the exception of two female respondents (Interviewees 1 and 3) who had been enthusiastic about hallyu for 8 and 9 years, respectively. This suggests that most respondents encountered the new version of hallyu (i.e. hallyu 2.0) while having little knowledge of the earlier Korean wave phenomenon.

The participants were between 19 and 29 years of age and were undergraduate or graduate students (N = 29), with the exception of six recent graduates. While the majority of the subjects were Canadians and were interviewed on site in Vancouver, Canada (N = 27), a few American residents were interviewed via Skype (N = 8). All the participants were enthusiastic about Korean pop culture, and some had been involved in off-line fan activities and had even gone to Korea as tourists or to learn the language. The participants were recruited via snowballing methods as well as advertisements on Korean pop culture-related online communities. We used a semi-structured interview to allow interviewees to express their experiences and opinions beyond our questions. Each individual interview lasted for 1–2 hours, and the participants were asked about how and why they enjoy Korean pop culture, which is an issue that was addressed by some of the previous studies of hallyu. In addition, the interviewees were asked about how they use social media and other technologies to engage with Korean pop culture. Furthermore, they expressed their thoughts on the hallyu phenomenon in North America and the role of social media in the surge of the wave.

The interviews were transcribed and read through so that repeated themes could be identified. By pursuing recursive reading “through or beyond the data” (Mason, 2002: 149), we contextualized and explored what the data represent. This interpretative reading of the data (Mason, 2002) helped to reveal how the interviewees understand the social phenomenon of hallyu. In particular, it showed what the participants counted as meaningful in their engagement with Korean pop culture. Recursive readings also enabled interpretations of the participants’ narratives from different angles. Furthermore, the focused codes, such as technology, sociality, and textuality, emerged through the process of recursive reading and coding, which led to the generation of the theoretical framework that is presented in this article (Charmaz, 2006).

The emergence of the social mediascape of hallyu 2.0

While several factors, such as favorable government policy and the enhanced quality of cultural content, explain the global spread of Korean pop culture, the most noteworthy element of the current Korean wave is the swift advance of social media and its influence in the realm of local cultural products. In this study, the respondents were accessing social media to enjoy K-pop, video games (e.g. online games and mobile games on smartphones), television programs, and films. In addition, Korean-based smartphones and video games were popularly adopted as a part of hallyu.

The way in which social media evolved in regard to fan practices was well observed in the accounts of the two respondents (Interviewees 1 and 3) whose engagement with hallyu had already begun during the pre-social media era. For instance, Interviewee 3, a 24-year-old Canadian woman who had been a Korean wave fan for over 9 years, recalled the emergence of social media in her cultural practices. She initially learned of BoA (i.e. a K-pop singer who performs in both Korean and Japanese) and her Japanese songs through her friends.³ However, it was YouTube that substantially increased her interest in, and knowledge of, Korean pop culture. During our interview, she noted,

I stumbled upon Korean songs on YouTube through various situations. […] This all happened around 2005. It snowballed into something larger as YouTube expanded and Korean music videos flourished. My exploration led me from one thing to another, and I was completely hooked.

This account reminds us that the major social media technologies, including Facebook (2004), YouTube (2005), and iPhone (2007), appeared between 2004 and 2007; thus, in the early stage of the Korean wave (i.e. hallyu 1.0), fans were unable to use these social media.

Therefore, it is not difficult to contend that at the center of the new Korean wave is the development of new media technology. The fans in this study were immersed in the social mediascape through which the hallyu content was increasingly available and spreadable. As Interviewee 2, a 21-year-old Canadian man, noted, “The growth of the Korean wave is substantially a direct result of social media. I don’t think there’s any other medium in which information can travel and grow this exponentially.” Making a comparison between Korean and Japanese pop culture, Interviewee 12, a 24 year-old Canadian woman, addressed the unique presence and availability of hallyu content on YouTube: “It’s difficult to find Japanese stuff, especially with English subtitles. In comparison [to Japanese pop culture], Korean drama and K-pop are all over YouTube, and they’re accessible in countries all over the world. Subtitles are also easy to find.” This account resonates with critics’ analysis of hallyu 2.0, in which the recent global popularity of K-pop is attributed to its high availability and viral diffusion on YouTube (Lee, 2012; Lee and Kuwahara, 2014).

Overall, the accounts of the fans in the present study reveal that the social mediascape of the new Korean wave comprises three dimensions—a technology dimension involving certain affordances that frame users’ actions,⁴ a sociality dimension addressing the participatory cultural atmosphere that is facilitated by fans, and a textuality dimension revealing the conjunction between the impurity and spreadability of media content. These dimensions will be discussed in the following three sections.

Technological affordances of the social mediascape of hallyu

The respondents’ cultural practices were embedded in the environment of media convergence in which various media are articulated with each other, and their users are likely to appropriate forms of media without a clear sense of boundaries between these media (Jenkins, 2004). Most respondents did not necessarily utilize a singular form of traditional media, such as television, radio, or film, to access the Korean wave content that was circulated via multifaceted yet converged media platforms. In particular, social media, which allowed the users transnational access to Korean pop culture content, seemed to rapidly replace the role of the traditional media in the new Korean wave.

The lack of availability and presence of Korean pop culture content in mainstream North American media may have triggered the emergence of the social mediascape of hallyu. The respondents in this study often noted that reliance on social media was inevitable since broadcast and cable media channels have not programmed hallyu content on a regular basis, with the exception of a very limited number of satellite or cable channels. Thus, they accessed hallyu content through video-streaming or file-sharing sites.⁵ Interviewee 20, a 20-year-old female Canadian, described how she accessed K-pop and K-dramas: “I usually enjoy them on Facebook. My friends share links or talk about Korean music and dramas. I also watch music videos on YouTube. On other online streaming sites, I watch Korean dramas and movies.” For some respondents, the technological affordances of social media seemed to frame the ways in which they enjoyed new Korean wave content. As Interviewee 13, a 21-year-old American woman, commented, “I usually just search on YouTube, where I get updates on my feed from artists I have already subscribed to.” She became familiar with the latest hallyu content by watching “whatever shows up on Viki.com,” which is one of the most popular sites for video-streaming services among hallyu fans.

The respondents considered the social mediascape as a user-friendly and user-oriented arena. For example, Interviewee 24, a 21-year-old American woman who had been enthusiastic about Korean movies, dramas, and pop music for over 2 years, described social media as a user-customized channel to enable fans to consciously choose and access the content:

In social media, I have to click on things myself and consciously decide to watch and listen to certain things, in which case I can actively choose not to. In traditional media [such as TV], I see advertisements or hear music playing even if I did not click to play it. [In social media,] I like that I can be exposed to things and feel more connected to the culture while also knowing I haven’t abandoned myself in the process.

The rapid circulation of music videos, drama clips, and information about K-pop and K-drama stars on the social mediascape seemed to transform the nature of cultural consumption. For the respondents, consuming pop culture did not mean the possession of materials; rather, it implied participatory processes, such as searching, accessing, enjoying, and reworking. In particular, searching and surfing the web serendipitously introduced some respondents to Korean pop culture. Interviewee 34, a 21-year-old American female college student, described how her interest in hallyu began:

In high school, I accidentally stumbled upon a drama title, Full House, while browsing YouTube. And then, I was searching for the American show of the same title, but the Korean one kept popping up. So, one day, I decided to give it a try and ended up watching the whole series.

This initiation process of becoming a fan suggests that technological affordances may be increasingly influential in the dissemination of hallyu. There may be no better example than the “Gangnam Style” phenomenon (2012) in explaining the importance of a technology dimension in hallyu 2.0. K-pop critic Lee SungKyu points out that the viral circulation of the “Gangnam Style” video in global markets was possible mainly because of YouTube and Twitter. In particular, the phenomenon was seemingly ignited by the initial Twitter mentions made by two popular users—an overseas K-pop fan (@WeLoveDara) and an influential entertainment manager, Scooter Braun, who discovered Justin Bieber (Lee, 2012). Of course, the phenomenon is not only because of social media but also because of the traditional media, including television and radio. After the social media success of “Gangnam Style,” the traditional media, such as NBC’s Today Show, started to introduce Psy, and this media convergence of the traditional and new media expedited the global sensation of “Gangnam Style” (Jin, in press). In regard to the emergence of hallyu fandom, the technological affordances of the social mediascape appear to be an influential factor for many global fans and the traditional media.

The sociality of the social mediascape of hallyu

The circulation of the Korean wave in the social mediascape enhances, and is enhanced by, participatory cultural practices. Many respondents in this study started to enjoy Korean pop culture through user-generated content, including YouTube, after they learned about the popularity of several cultural forms from their friends on Facebook and Twitter. While the technological affordances of social media distinguish the recent Korean wave from its earlier wave, this does not mean that the fans’ practices are determined by the technological aspect of social media. Social media can constitute a meaningful cultural economy of fandom only when it involves users’ engagement and participation.

The respondents in the study commented on the ways in which social media contributed to networking and sharing with peer fans. Most respondents who could not speak Korean sought the prompt translation of the Korean content; therefore, the peer production of subtitles and translations played a crucial role in the rapid circulation of the Korean wave. While the mainstream media were unable to provide North American fans with the prompt cultural and linguistic translation of Korean content, the fans kept translating and circulating hallyu materials, especially via participatory online social networking or video-streaming portal sites, such as YouTube and Viki. Once translated by bilingual fans, the original content tended to be revised, recommended (or disapproved), shared, reframed, and remixed by numerous, often anonymous, participants. Social media facilitate the process of retranslation in that it transforms hard media content, which is contained in a traditional media form, into soft, re-mixable, and spreadable forms. For instance, TV programs quickly become available on YouTube or Viki, among many other websites, and are shared among fans while being integrated into their Facebook timelines. The viral speed and scale of the translation and circulation of Korean pop culture in the social mediascape imply that a wide range of media users are potentially “shaping, sharing, reframing, and remixing media content in ways which might not have been previously imagined” (Jenkins et al., 2013: 2).

In the present study, sharing practices not only included the uploading/downloading of pirated materials but also the sharing of information, opinions, and feelings. As Interviewee 15, a 24-year-old Canadian man, explained, social media enabled users to exchange their comments on Korean pop culture:

Facebook has helped to promote the [Korean] culture shared by friends. In addition, YouTube has a big impact based on the number of subscriptions and views. The comments posted by many users from around the world encouraged other people to become more aware of the culture. […] Social media has definitely played a major role in promoting the Korean wave. People around the world can share, post, and provide countless feedback.

Hallyu fans’ practices of sharing can be understood in the wider context of the emerging digital-sharing culture, which is driven by the collaborative creation and consumption of popular cultural texts and challenges the dominant notion of ownership, authenticity, and creativity (Denison, 2011). As original materials can be easily recreated and owned in many different ways in the social mediascape, the very notion of authenticity is questioned by fans’ creative practices. For instance, as exemplified by the ongoing phenomenon of the fan subbing of K-dramas on the Internet, fans do not value “authentic” or “accurate” translation but rather appreciate the creative aspect of engaging with texts through voluntary translation and interpretation (Dwyer, 2012).

The participatory culture of hallyu fandom emerged and flourished via sharing practices on social media. In this respect, Interviewee 18, a 20-year-old Canadian man, raised an intriguing point:

Korean stuff is shared, and it changes what I am exposed to and what I may like in the future. If it is not shared, I may never have checked out that Korean restaurant or listened to the new K-pop single. In particular, sharing on social media changes who I enjoy it [the Korean stuff] with. Social media is completely changing my experience through my peers, as I know only few who regularly immerse themselves in Korean culture.

Based on this account, the social mediascape is a means to connect a fan to a wide range of other fans and even to shape his or her cultural tastes by managing his or her virtual fan networks. This networking process via social media seemed to offer a platform for discussions and deliberation, as Interviewee 25, a 21-year-old Canadian woman, noted, “I think social media provides the opinions and reviews of others around me, which then shapes my own opinion of a certain Korean TV show or K-pop band.” For her, the social mediascape seemed to be seen as a form of public sphere in which individuals share their opinions.

The impure textuality of hallyu

The new Korean wave appears to be relatively spreadable due to its textual and contextual “impurity” (Jenkins et al., 2013). By impurity, Jenkins et al. (2013) point to the “unexpected mixing and mingling of cultural materials,” which appeal to multiple audiences beyond national boundaries (p. 263). As an example of a impure cultural form, the authors address the viral Internet phenomenon of the music video “Ha-He” by the Kenyan pop group Just A Band and its highly remixed and playful social media campaigns, which revived and globally disseminated the fictional local hero character Makmende whose origin itself was supposedly influenced by the 1980s’ American pop culture (Jenkins et al., 2013: 261–265; see also Ekdale and Tully, 2014). In the present study, above all, Korean pop cultural texts tended to be identified by their hybrid and impure attributes. The perceived impurity in the recent hallyu phenomenon can be compared to the findings of earlier hallyu studies, in which purity was often considered a significant feature of K-dramas, such as Winter Sonata; traditional family values and “pure love” were representative themes in the K-dramas especially in the early 2000s (Lee and Ju, 2010). Most respondents enjoyed Korean pop culture not because of its alleged Korean or Asian sensibilities, but because of its mixed textual aspects. For instance, most respondents preferred the mixture of Korean and English in K-pop music lyrics, which, it was felt, made the content more familiar and interesting. As Interviewee 20, a 20-year-old Canadian woman, noted,

I noticed a mix of Korean and English a lot [in K-pop]. I think it does influence my liking and following K-pop. It makes it easier for me to follow and understand, and I can sing along to the chorus and remember songs better.

It is also evident in the hallyu 2.0 era that the Korean wave is not necessarily represented by Korean-born and raised stars. Korea’s major entertainment companies have recruited global talents for their K-pop idol groups (i.e. boy and girl bands).⁶ Pointing out the transnational characters of Korean pop singers, Interviewee 10, a 23-year-old female, commented that hallyu stars who are Korean Americans or Koreans educated abroad have a noticeable impact on the emerging new Korean wave and that “perhaps this characteristic [i.e., the global background of hallyu stars] appeals to the global cross-cultural fans who enjoy and access Korean media online.” The increasing hybridity of Korean pop cultural figures is further observed in the positive representation of mixed-race K-pop singers, such as Mi-rae Yoon and Michelle Lee, both of whom are half African American and half Korean. The diversified background of hallyu stars is noteworthy given that Korea has long been self-identified as a racially homogeneous nation that is rooted in the ideology of “blood purity” and infamous for its discrimination against “mixed-race” populations (Lee, 2008).

For the respondents, Korean pop cultural forms were appealing largely because of their impure mixture of Western and local cultures. Hallyu was perceived as “Western-inspired” pop culture, on the one hand, and “different” (i.e. different from American culture) on the other. Interviewer 1, a 21-year-old woman, noted, “[The recent Korean wave] is a mixture of Eastern and Western cultures, so allows people to be exposed to the both cultures. It’s not too traditional, not too unfamiliar.” The ambivalent or even contradictory perceptions of the Korean wave imply that the recent hallyu might be a set of various intangible cultural forms rather than a particular genre or style that can be easily defined. As Interviewee 10, a 23-year-old woman, noted, “There is always something to suit a variety of tastes in K-pop.”

The discourse of impurity that appeared in our interviews suggests that the new Korean wave fans might not be exclusively loyal to Korean pop culture. Despite their self-identification as fans of the Korean wave, many respondents were not necessarily exclusively enthusiastic about Korean pop culture. For instance, Interviewee 33, a 24-year-old female American fan, did not deny the probable temporary nature of her taste for Korean pop culture when she noted, “The idea of different cultures is exciting for me, and I feel that Korean culture is currently my phase.”

The recent hallyu phenomenon as a set of impure media practices questions the discourse of quality suggested by media critics and academics in the earlier period of the Korean wave. The quality-oriented approach to Korean pop culture not only narrowly defines the cultural practices of the Korean wave in terms of a Western standard of “quality” (Hong-Mercier, 2013) but also fails to pay due attention to an emerging environment of the social mediascape. In the social mediascape of hallyu, media texts may spread for reasons other than their quality. Some fans were uncertain about the quality of Korean pop culture, although they enjoyed it very much. Interviewee 12, a 24-year-old Canadian woman, stated that K-drama characters and plots were often too stereotypical and predictable. However, for her, K-dramas were “highly addictive” since she had begun watching them via social media. In this manner, “omnivorous audiences” (Hong-Mercier, 2013) are increasingly engaging with the viral pleasure offered by the Korean wave. In comparison, for some respondents who were enthusiastic about K-pop in particular, the room for engagement with the original texts, especially via YouTube and Facebook, was an attractive feature of hallyu. Users share, post, and remake what they like, as exemplified by the numerous parodies of the original video text of “Gangnam Style” (Lee and Kuwahara, 2014).

Impurity in the recent Korean pop culture appears to make the texts more approachable and spreadable. In the social mediascape of hallyu 2.0, the ethnic or national characteristics of the content may be diluted by global fans embracing transnational mobility as an element of their everyday cultural practices. In addition, globalizing social media often softens the linguistic and cultural barriers of the recent Korean wave.

Conclusion

This study has explored how the recent global phenomenon of Korean pop culture is experienced by North American fans. The study has found that the social mediascape transforms transnational media consumption, in which grassroots practices are articulated with the spreadability of new media technology. It has addressed the case of North American youth, a population that has rarely been addressed in previous studies of hallyu, which focused predominantly on its intra-Asian flows. In addition, it has explored the role of the media environment in cultural consumption, which has not been sufficiently examined in the previously content-oriented analyses of hallyu.

This study suggests that the technological affordances of social media and fans’ sociality interplay with each other and rapidly spread hallyu as a set of impure cultural forms. The empirical data of the study reveal that the technology of social media and the sociality of global fans make hallyu spreadable. However, technology and sociality may not always enhance the spreadability of the media. It is probable that the social media-driven consumption of the Korean wave may be no more than a mediated “cocoon” in which digital native youth is interpellated into narcissistic media consumers. Some respondents in this study were highly dependent on the algorithmic processes of social media; therefore, their online fan practices appeared to oscillate between interactivity and interpassivity (Taylor, 2012). Consequently, it is still questionable how new the participatory culture of hallyu in the social mediascape is subverting the very hegemony of the corporate-led, profit-seeking nature of social media. While the social mediascape enables the global fans to spread the wave, the nature of the participatory culture emerging through the social mediascape may require further investigation.

It is also important to consider that technological affordances and sociality themselves are conditioned by the cultural contexts in which they are situated and which characterize the Korean wave as a unique example of mediated popular cultural flows. Even with the increased spreadability via digital media, fans access, consume, and negotiate Korean pop culture in a particular local context (Sohn, 2012). In this respect, it can be suggested that the local characteristics of the North American fans of hallyu in the present study may play a significant role in spreading the media. The North American fans’ practices of hallyu addressed in this study offer a reference point to be compared to those in the intra-Asian context in which the earlier Korean wave, hallyu 1.0., emerged. In particular, the cultural taste for impurity among North American fans in this study appeared to be effectively articulated with the emerging spreadable media forms, such as social media. The observed spreadability in hallyu 2.0, however, does not necessarily mean that the tensions and barriers to transcultural flows are rapidly disappearing. In this respect, as Appadurai (2013) points out, hallyu 2.0 as a new transcultural phenomenon requires more contextualized studies revealing the tensions and blocks implied in cultural circulation.

Footnotes

Funding

This research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial, or not-for-profit sectors.

Notes

Author biographies

Dal Yong Jin finished his PhD degree from the Institute of Communications Research at the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign. His major research and teaching interests are on social media and convergence, mobile technologies and game studies, globalization and media, and the political economy of media and culture. He is the author of several books, such as De-convergence of Global Media Industries (2013), Korea’s Online Gaming Empire (2010), and Hands On/Hands Off: The Korean State and the Market Liberalization of the Communication Industry (2011).

Kyong Yoon is Assistant Professor in the Department of Critical Studies at the University of British Columbia Okanagan, Canada. His research interests are transnational media, digital mobile communication, and new media audience.

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