‘Do they really do that in Korea?’: multicultural learning through Hallyu media

Abstract

As new media spaces expand opportunities for engagement with geographically distant people and places, this article examines how communication practices within such spaces may construct cultural differences. The study’s data source was a website on which people posted, watched, and discussed Asian dramas. Qualitative data included writing, visual images, and interactions created within the site’s Korean dramas forum. Analyses of user-generated discussions revealed discourses about Korean distinctiveness. The forum functions as a virtual multicultural learning community where youth who lived outside of Korea imagined and negotiated an understanding of Korean culture. As these youth participated in Hallyu (the Korean Wave) through their engagements with its media, their discourses on Korean distinctiveness reinscribe Koreans as a global Other. Implications of this study include ways that online transnational engagements with Korean dramas in particular, and Hallyu media in general, shape current learning about Korea, as well as the possibilities and challenges of new media affordances for Internet-mediated multicultural learning.