Youth, Social Media and Transnational Cultural Distribution: The Case of Online K-pop Circulation

Abstract

Since the late 1990s, Korean popular culture has circulated broadly across the Asian region and to a lesser degree the global cultural market via a phenomenon commonly known as the Korean Wave or Hallyu (Chua & Iwabuchi, 2008). Popular television drama series like Winter Sonata (2002), Dae Jang Geum (2003–2004), Full House (2004) and Boys over Flower (2009) have met with great success in many Asian countries including Japan, Singapore, Hong Kong and Thailand. Recently, K-pop (Korean popular music) has been widely circulated via new media technologies such as fan-blogs, peer-to-peer websites, video-sharing websites, micro-blogging and mobile internet.1 Employing K-pop circulation as its primary case study, this chapter examines how youth social media activities reinforce and construct a new global cultural dissemination model that I identify as social distribution. I use this term to refer to distribution practices enabled by fans’ online social networks, which involves distribution across fan bases in different regions of the world, thus allowing for the simultaneous, multidirectional and transnational circulations of creative products. Advanced digital media technologies render the global pop culture market landscape extremely changeable, and through these channels Korean pop products have become visible in a range of online and offline markets globally.