Digital Mediascapes of Transnational Korean Youth Culture

Kyong Yoon

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780429890208
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Informatik
• Subtopic: Soziale Aspekte in der Informatik

Drawing on vivid ethnographic field studies of youth on the transnational move, across Seoul, Toronto, and Vancouver, this book examines transnational flows of Korean youth and their digital media practices.

This book explores how digital media are integrated into various forms of transnational life and imagination, focusing on young Koreans and their digital media practices. By combining theoretical discussion and in depth empirical analysis, the book provides engaging narratives of transnational media fans, sojourners, and migrants. Each chapter illustrates a form of mediascape, in which transnational Korean youth culture and digital media are uniquely articulated. This perceptive research offers new insights into the transnationalization of youth cultural practices, from K-pop fandom to smartphone-driven storytelling.

A transnational and ethnographic focus makes this book the first of its kind, with an interdisciplinary approach that goes beyond the scope of existing digital media studies, youth culture studies, and Asian studies. It will be essential reading for scholars and students in media studies, migration studies, popular culture studies, and Asian studies.

1 Introduction

Transnational Youth and Digital Media

In August 2016, Tiffany, a member of the popular Korean pop group Girls’ Generation, posted photos on her Instagram with a Japanese flag emoticon and an image of the Rising Sun Flag (known as ugilgi in Korean and kyokujitsuki in Japanese) to indicate that she was in Tokyo for a concert. The 27-year-old soon realized that her postings caused heated disputes among her Korean fans. Uploaded on August 15th, Korea’s annual Liberation Day, which commemorates the country’s independence from Japanese colonialism in 1945, the postings triggered public criticism of this Korean American star’s ignorance of Korea’s colonial history and memory. Consequently, Tiffany posted an apology—a picture of a handwritten note in Korean—on her Instagram page the following day, stating, “I am sorry for causing trouble on such a meaningful day. I am very embarrassed and regretful about my mistake, I will be more considerate next time” (Choi, 2016).

This incident shows how popular culture, digital media, and young people interact with each other in transnational contexts. As a popular figure in Asian youth culture and Korean idol pop music (K-pop)’s intra-Asian cultural traffic, Tiffany was criticized by her Korean fans due to her social media postings that she uploaded in Japan. While digital media enabled her to keep her fans informed about her intra-Asian tour, it also reminded her of existing national borders and her ethnic identity. Perhaps her identity as a Korean American born in California and trained by a major Korean entertainment agency since the age of 12 further complicates the transnational aspect of this incident. The Korean public has maintained an ambivalent attitude toward Western-raised talents of Korean heritage, desiring yet distancing itself from such individuals (Ahn, 2018). The Korean media industry has sought “global talents” (Ahn, 2018; Shin & Choi, 2015); consequently, young foreign-born Koreans—Tiffany, Jay Park, Krystal, and Eric Nam, to name a few—have continuously been introduced to Korean audiences. Due to their transnational experiences and upbringing, these young entertainers/artistes have further facilitated the already vibrant Korean media industry. However, as shown in the fans’ responses to Tiffany’s postings, the globally recruited figures of Korean heritage have conveniently been represented as “us” or “them.”

As young people physically or virtually move across national boundaries, they constantly engage with cultural forms that are produced in other countries. Digital media play an integral role in young people’s physical and/or imagined border crossings. However, as shown in the Korean fans’ dispute over the Japanese imperialist symbols in Tiffany’s postings, the nation as an imagined community has not necessarily lost its influence on the seemingly transnationalized landscapes of youth culture. While transnational encounters may provide young people with resources for “possible lives” (Appadurai, 1996), young people’s transnational cultural practices are not free of globalization’s tensions, contradictions, and obstacles. In this regard, this book address how young people’s agency is articulated with existing structural forces, such as resilient national gatekeeping and the hegemonic ideology of neoliberalism.

Korean youth and their culture have increasingly become transnational, especially since the 1990s. Over the past three decades, young Koreans’ transnational mobility has been accelerated by the substantial deregulation of overseas tourism and studies abroad, as well as the flourishing national economy and media industry. In particular, since the Kim Young-sam administration’s (1993–1998) declaration of globalization as a national policy in the mid-1990s, which consequently opened the country’s domestic market based on international trade agreements, Korea has rapidly been incorporated into the global neoliberal system (S. S. Kim, 2000). Furthermore, the popularization of the Internet and the digital revolution have exposed young Koreans to transnational culture and media forms. Thus, for a better understanding of the contemporary youth cultures in and of Korea, it is important to examine the incorporation of digital media into young people’s everyday lives.

In recent cultural studies, young people’s cultural practices have been examined through global–local interactions (Maira & Soep, 2004; Pilkington & Johnson, 2003; Wise, 2008). These studies have explored how young people use “global resources to deal with local conditions” (Wise, 2008, p. 63). In particular, Maira and Soep (2004) proposed a framework to address how local young people’s cultural practices are embedded within the shifts in local, national, and global forces, which is referred to as the “youthscape.”

Despite flourishing theoretical and empirical discussions of youth culture in the global context over the past two decades at least, the globalization discourse has often involved the assumption of cores or norms, rather than the exploration of diverse transnational interactions (Lionnet & Shih, 2005). However, due in part to the role of digital media, young people have become increasingly involved in multidirectional transnational flows. The dominant discourse of globalization often assumes “a universal core or norm, which spreads out across the world while pulling into its vortex other forms of culture to be tested by its norm”; however, young people have increasingly engaged with the possibility of cultures “produced and performed without necessary mediation by the center” (Lionnet & Shih, 2005, p. 5). For example, the recent intra-Asian cultural flows have revealed that young people in non-Western regions appropriate various hybrid cultural texts, moving beyond the West–Rest framework. Many young Japanese and other Asians have been enthusiastic about K-pop, and an increasing number of candidates from other Asian countries have participated in auditions to become K-pop idols. The intra-Asian flows of popular culture show that Asian youth who enjoy K-pop may not necessarily consume this Asian cultural genre in relation to its Western counterpart (e.g., as a supplement to or replacement for Western pop music). In particular, the K-pop phenomenon in Japan raises questions regarding how and why Japanese youth enjoy the pop music of a country that was colonized and discriminated against by the Japanese colonial power. That is, recent transnational cultural phenomena have revealed various moments and forces that affect young people’s cultural practices and identities.

This chapter provides the theoretical and empirical contexts for the role and meaning of digital media among young Koreans and their culture in transnational contexts, with reference to the post-1990s. It offers a framework for understanding the empirical chapters, and it discusses the process, rationale, and outline of the research on which the book draws. Drawing on media and cultural studies’ frameworks and extensive empirical studies, this book examines young people’s digital media practices in the transnational context, questioning how they access and appropriate global cultural resources to negotiate their locally specific conditions and identity work. In particular, it analyzes digital media as an increasingly important transnational cultural resource. Existing cultural studies of global youth have paid insufficient attention to the role of digital media in the transnational flows of youth cultural forms. Consequently, it is important to address digital media as integral components of young people’s everyday lives.

This book examines how young Koreans and their digital media practices are on the transnational move. Drawing on extensive field studies conducted between 2004 and 2018, this book explores how digital media are integrated into various forms of transnational life and imagination. Through its five case study-based chapters, the book provides engaging narratives that reveal the realities and complexities of young people’s digital media practices. The book critically examines the digital generation’s lived experiences with transnational media flows by addressing different groups of young people who are virtually and/or physically mobile: transnational popular culture fans, young people in transnational families, overseas sojourners, and young migrants.

The young people examined in this book are not a homogeneous group. However, they can be categorized as the “digital generation” as they share common experiences of digital media evolution to some extent. That is, the young people under examination in this book may constitute a “media generation [. . .] constructed as collectively produced, shared and processed responses to the availability or pervasiveness of a particular technology” (Vittadini, Siibak, Reifová, & Bilandzic, 2014, p. 66). This digital generation includes young people who might share similar memories about the development of new media, such as the Internet and particular social media, from their childhood, despite potential differences in their social and cultural backgrounds.

By examining a facet of the digital generation, each chapter illustrates a form of mediascape, in which transnational Korean youth culture and digital media are uniquely articulated with each other. In so doing, the book proposes the transnational mediascape framework, by which media are analyzed as a series of imaginations, practices, and negotiations (Appadurai, 1996; Georgiou, 2006). By utilizing the suffix “scape,” Appadurai (1996) examined the processes of globalization as

deeply perspectival constructs, inflected by the historical, linguistic, and political situatedness of different sorts of actors: nation-states, multinationals, diasporic communities, as well as subnational groupings and movements (whether religious, political, or economic), and even intimate face-to-face groups, such as villages, neighborhoods, and families.

(p. 33)

Among other “-scapes”, the mediascape refers to “distribution of electronic capabilities,” which also involves various inflections, depending on such factors as technological mode, audiences, and media ownership (Appadurai, 1996). By applying the term “mediascape,” this book examines how different structural and agentic forces are involved in digital media-driven flows of transnational youth culture.

The book aims to explore how young people’s digital media practices are transnationalized and, thus, contribute to redefining their cultural identities. Through an in-depth observation of the digital generation’s media practices, the book addresses under-researched questions about the integration of digital media into the transnational lives and cultural imaginations of young people. By examining the movements and traces of digital media and their users throughout and beyond Korea, this book offers a transnational and ethnographic analysis of digital Korea and its youth culture. In so doing, it makes methodological and empirical contributions to the field.

First, the research problematizes pervasive “methodological nationalism,” which considers the nation-state as a naturalized unit of analysis (Wimmer & Glick Schiller, 2002). Transnationalism offers a critical perspective that recognizes “the possibilities of networks and communities to surpass national boundaries, as well as the continuing significance of the national borders in partly framing and restricting social actions and their meanings” (Georgiou, 2006, p. 10). This book enriches the digital media scholarship by exploring media practices as transnational and diasporic flows that can be constrained and redirected by the ways in which globalizing and localizing forces are articulated with each other (Georgiou, 2006; Y. Kim, 2011; Madianou & Miller, 2012; Sun & Sinclair, 2016).

Second, the ethnographic research on the transnational traces and movements of digital media and their users offers an insightful cultural investigation of global and local digital mediascapes. This ethnographic research on transnational media flows challenges the top-down approach through which digital media are analyzed as a structural or institutional process. The book makes a contribution by furthering cultural and media studies’ methodological scopes, which often focus narrowly on media representation or small groups of audiences (Moores, 2012). By examining various young people’s lived cultures and media uses, the ambivalent and complex nature of media in the transnational construction of youth identities can be revealed. In addition, the book’s ethnographic research explores how emerging digital media are appropriated in relation to other areas of our daily lives (Moores, 2012) and how newer digital media might remediate and be signified in relation to older media forms (e.g., the television) (Bolter & Grusin, 2000). In so doing, the book examines the role of digital media in young people’s transnational lives, in which they negotiate between different digital media forms and cultural identities (Madianou & Miller, 2012).

Evolution of Youth Culture in Korea

Korean popular cultural forms emerged on a global scale in the 21st century. As exemplified by the Korean Wave (i.e., the global diffusion of Korean popular culture) and the global fans of K-pop in particular, global youth have increasingly engaged with cultural forms that have emerged in Korea. This phenomenon is surprising, especially given Korea’s recent and short history of deregulation and the liberalization of its cultural industries. Indeed, for three decades between the 1960s and 1980s, the country was ruled by military regimes that strictly regulated the transnational flows of young people and youth cultural forms, and thus, the exposure of Korean youth and their cultures to transnational contexts has been relatively recent.

Until the 1990s, authoritarian regimes imposed the values of anticommunism and patriotism on young people through numerous educational regulations and rituals, such as nationally controlled history textbooks and the Charter for National Education (J. Kang, 2016). The Park Chung-hee regime, which took power through a military coup in 1961 and ended with Park’s assassination in 1979, and the next military regime (1980–1988), which was established by the military coup and civilian massacre by Chun Doo-hwan, sought rapid, export-driven development by oppressing any dissident voices (Kim & Shin, 2010). Thus, not surprisingly, young people’s transnational imaginations and cultural practices were restricted to a large extent until the 1990s. Due to nationalizing forces that imposed defensive nationalism from above, young people were not significantly exposed to transnational influences under the authoritarian regimes. Under the system of total mobilization for authoritarian development, Koreans were constantly interpellated into kukmi...