Focusing on young South Koreans, the book examines the integration of digital media into transnational life and imagination. It delves into their unique digital practices, revealing how these technologies shape cultural identities and global connections. Through this lens, the work highlights the interplay between local experiences and global influences in the digital age.
Focusing on the experiences of diasporic Korean youth, this book explores their engagement with the Korean Wave, or Hallyu, through an ethnographic study of Korean Canadian adolescents. It critically analyzes how these youth navigate cultural flows and negotiate their identities amidst multiple national contexts. By framing the Korean Wave as a practice of diasporic culture rather than merely a diffusion of products, the work enhances the understanding of transnational audience studies and youth cultural practices.
While the influence of Western, Anglophone popular culture has continued in the global cultural market, the Korean cultural industry has substantially developed and globally exported its various cultural products, such as television programs, pop music, video games and films. The global circulation of Korean popular culture is known as the Korean wave, or Hallyu. Given its empirical scope and theoretical contributions, this book will be highly appealing to any scholar or student interested in media globalization and contemporary Asia popular culture. These chapters present the evolution of Hallyu as a transnational process and addresses two distinctive aspects of the recent Hallyu phenomenon - digital technology integration and global reach. This book will be the first monograph to comprehensively and comparatively examine the translational flows of Hallyu through extensive field studies conducted in the US, Canada, Chile, Spain and Germany.