The Korean Wave

Since the Korean Wave phenomenon started in 1997, Hallyu has undergone many changes. Geographically, while Asia has been the largest cultural market for the Korean cultural industries, other parts of society, including North America, Europe, the Middle East, and Latin America have gradually admitted Korean popular culture. The components of the Korean Wave have also greatly expanded. Hallyu originally implied the exports of a few cultural products, such as television dramas, popular music, and films; however, Korea has recently developed and exported K-pop, digital games and smartphone technologies as well as relevant youth culture. Meanwhile, industrial and technological contexts of the Korean Wave have changed significantly during the last 20 years. The role of social media in the Korean Wave’s transnationalization in recent years is especially intriguing because fans around the world can easily access social media to enjoy K-pop, digital games, and films. The changes in the nature and appearance of the Korean Wave, conceptual and theoretical shifts in the studies of the Korean Wave, and the influences of the development of media technologies on the Korean Wave are all very significant. This book aims to provide a better understanding of Hallyu's theoretical and institutional history on one hand, and new features of the Korean Wave on the other hand.

korean wave,hallyu,Korean culture,Korean,south korea,Korean pop culture This book is the first in a series of upcoming books to introduce modern Korean culture overseas. The term “Korean Wave” (“Hallyu” in Korean) was coined by the Chinese press a little more than a decade ago to refer to the popularity of Korean pop culture in China. The boom started with the export of Korean television dramas (miniseries) to China in the late 1990s. Since then, South Korea has emerged as a new center for the production of transnational pop culture, exporting a range of cultural products to neighboring Asian countries. More recently, Korean pop culture has begun spreading from its comfort zone in Asia to more global audiences in the Middle East, Africa, Europe, and the Americas. Birth of the Korean Wave Birth of the Wave The Beginning of the Wave in Japan The Wave Goes Global K-Pop Joins the Wave The neo-Korean Wave ‘Korean Invasion?’ The New Wave The Internet Connects the Wave Fast The Fun of Copying Distance No Longer a Barrier for K-Dramas What’s Korean Pop Culture Got? K-Pop: ‘Music of Fusion’ K-Dramas: ‘Healthy Power’ The Korean Wave in other Fields Korean Films Hallyu in Literature epilogue Will It Continue?

The rise in popularity of South Korean entertainment and culture began and is promoted as an official policy of the Korean government to revive the country's economy. This study examines cultural production and consumption, glocalization, the West versus. Asia, global race consciousness, and changing views of masculinity and femininity.

The first scholarly volume to investigate the impact of social media and other communication technologies on the global dissemination of the Korean Wave

The 2012 smash "Gangnam Style" by the Seoul-based rapper Psy capped the triumph of Hallyu , the Korean Wave of music, film, and other cultural forms that have become a worldwide sensation. Dal Yong Jin analyzes the social and technological trends that transformed South Korean entertainment from a mostly regional interest aimed at families into a global powerhouse geared toward tech-crazy youth. Blending analysis with insights from fans and industry insiders, Jin shows how Hallyu exploited a media landscape and dramatically changed with the 2008 emergence of smartphones and social media, designating this new Korean Wave as Hallyu 2.0. Hands-on government support, meanwhile, focused on creative industries as a significant part of the economy and turned intellectual property rights into a significant revenue source. Jin also delves into less-studied forms like animation and online games, the significance of social meaning in the development of local Korean popular culture, and the political economy of Korean popular culture and digital technologies in a global context.

Seoul is a colossus both in its physical presence and the demand it places on any intellectual effort to understand it. How did it come to be? How can a city this immense work? Underlying its spectacle and incongruities is a city that might be described as ill at ease with its own past. The bitter rifts of Japanese colonization persist, as does the troubled aftermath of the Korean War and its divisions; the economic “Miracle on the Han” that followed is crosscut by memories of the violent dictatorship that drove it. In Seoul, author Ross King interrogates this contested history and its physical remnants, tacking between the city’s historiography and architecture, with attention to monuments, streets, and other urban spaces. The book’s structuring device is the dichotomy of erasure and memory as necessary preconditions for reinvention. King traces this phenomenon from the old dynasties to the Japanese regime and wartime destruction; he then follows the equally destructive reinvention of Korea under dictatorship to the brilliant city of the present with its extraordinary explosion of creativity and ideas—the post-1991 Hallyu, the Korean Wave. The final chapter returns to questions of forgetting and memory, but now as “conditions of possibility” for what would seem to underlie the present trajectory of this extraordinary city and culture. Seoul can be read, King suggests, in the context of the hybrid ideas that have characterized Korean cultural history. It may be their present eruption that accounts for the city of contradictions that confronts the contemporary observer and that most extraordinary of Korean phenomena: the rise of an alternative, virtual world, eclipsing both city and nation. Has the very idea of Korea been reinvented even as the weakly defined nation-state slips away?

Since the late 1990s South Korea has emerged as a new center for the production of transnational popular culture - the first instance of a major global circulation of Korean popular culture in history. Why popular (or not)? Why now? What does it mean socially, culturally and politically in a global context? This edited collection considers the Korean Wave in a 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. 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 media environment. 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. The Korean Wave combines theoretical perspectives with grounded case studies in an up-to-date and accessible volume ideal for both undergraduate and postgraduate students of Media and Communications, Cultural Studies, Korean Studies and Asian Studies.

The contributors analyse the subject of Asian pop culture arranged under three headings: 'Television Industry in East Asia', 'Transnational-Crosscultural Receptions of TV Dramas' and 'Nationalistic reactions'.