Introduction: Korean media in a digital cosmopolitan world

Since the late 1990s South Korea (hereafter Korea) has emerged as a new center for the production of transnational popular culture, exporting its own media products into Asian countries including Japan, China, Taiwan, Hong Kong and Singapore (Kim 2007 and 2011b). The spread of Korean popular culture overseas is referred to as the “Korean Wave” or “Hallyu” – a term first coined by Chinese news media in the middle of 1998 to describe Chinese youth’s sudden craze for Korean cultural products. Initiated by the export of TV dramas, it now includes a range of cultural products including Korean pop music (K-pop), films, animation, online games, smartphones, fashion, cosmetics, food and lifestyles. While its popularity is mainly concentrated in neighboring Asian markets, some of the products reach as far as the U.S., Mexico, Egypt, Iraq and, most recently, Europe. This is the first instance of a major global circulation of Korean popular culture in history. In June 2011, Korea’s production company held its first European concertin Paris, singing for fans from France, the UK, Germany, Spain, Italy and so on. The company initially scheduled only one show at Le Zenith de Parisconcert hall which seats about 6,000, but the tickets sold out in 15 minutes, prompting hundreds of fans to organize flash mobs in front of the Louvre museum to demand an extra show (Le Figaro 2011; Le Monde 2011). The company thus decided to arrange a second concert, then again the tickets sold out in minutes. An online-based fan club in the UK organized similar flash mobs in London’s Trafalgar Square to demand shows from K-pop acts (Guardian 2011). In 2012, Korean singer Psy became a global phenomenon with his song Gangnam Style and horse-riding dance move – the most watched video of 2012 on YouTube (1.5 billion views as of April 2013). There are an estimated 460,000 fans of the Korean Wave across Europe, concentrated in the UK and France. The trend is spreading to Europe through digital social networking services facilitated by the provision of information in English. A revival of the Korean Wave is being anticipated by the development ofdigital media forms, the use of the Internet and online marketing. While the rise of satellite broadcast fueled the spread of the Korean Wave in the 1990s, social networking services and video-sharing websites such as YouTube, Facebook and Twitter are now playing a primary role in expanding “digital Hallyu” to Asia, the U.S., Europe and elsewhere. Korean dramas are being uploaded to the Internet and available with subtitles in various languages including English, Japanese, Chinese and Spanish. Driven by a desire to “help” their idols, fans do real-time translations of idols’ performances on the social media. Soompi.com, a dominant source of Korean pop culture, has 6 million monthly users, who are consumers and creators of K-pop and Korean drama news. Allkpop.com, another English-based website with 4 million monthly readers, has seen a growth in its European readership: the Europeans made up 1% of the readers when the website launched in 2007, but close to 25% in 2011 (Guardian 2011). The interest in Korean popular culture has further triggered an increase inforeign tourists visiting the locations where their favorite dramas and acts had been filmed. Its impact has reached into communist North Korea (Kim 2007 and 2011b). In 2005, a 20-year-old North Korean soldier defected across the demilitarized zone and the reason given, according to South Korean military officials, was that the soldier had grown to admire and yearn for South Korea after watching its TV dramas which had been smuggled across the border of China (New York Times 2005). Similar cases have continued to occur, while the means of access to the Korean Wave media culture has expanded through the use of the Internet and cellular phones in North Korea (Daily NK 2011). According to recent interviews with North Korean refugees, young people from the wealthy families of Pyongyang are willing to pay around $20 a month for private lessons to learn the fashionable dances of Girls’ Generation (Sonyosidae), one of the most popular girl groups in the Korean Wave music (Lee and Seo 2012). In the past, national images of Korea were negatively associated with thedemilitarized zone, division and political disturbances, but now such imagesare gradually giving way to the vitality of trendy, transnational entertainers and cutting-edge technology. The success of Korean popular culture overseas is drawing an unfamiliar spotlight on a culture once colonized or overshadowed for centuries by powerful countries. The Asian region has long been under the influence of Western and Japanese cultural products. In the European imagination, Korea was once thought to be sandwiched between Japan and China and known only for exporting cars and electronics products, but now has made itself known through its culture (Le Monde 2011). The Korean government sees this phenomenon as a way to sell a dynamic image of the nation through soft power, the ability to entice and attract. The sudden attraction of the Korean Wave culture has presented a surprise: Why has it taken off so dramatically at this point? Why popular (or not)? Why now? What does it mean socially, culturallyand politically in global contexts? This book argues for the Korean Wave’s double capacity in the creation of new and complex spaces of identity that are both enabling and disabling cultural diversity in a digital cosmopolitan world. While not denying the obvious power of Western, particularly American, dominance over the international media landscape and the continuing significance of Western media imperialism, this book considers the Korean Wave in the global digital age and addresses the social, cultural and political implications in their complexity and paradox within the contexts of global inequalities and uneven power structures. Even the processes of contraflows today, such as the Korean Wave, are multiply structured, mutually reinforcing and sometimes conflicting, while reconfiguring the asymmetrical relations of power within hybridization processes. The emerging consequences at multiple levels – both macro structures and micro processes that influence media production, distribution, representation and consumption – deserve to be analyzed and explored fully in an increasingly global, cosmopolitan media environment.