Korean Communication, Media, and Culture is a bibliography of English-language publications for non-Korean-speaking academics, researchers, and professionals. In addition to the actual annotations of all the major books, book chapters, journal articles, and theses/dissertations, each chapter includes contextual introductory commentary on its topic. The authors not only historicize their findings but they also prescribe the direction that English-language research on Korean communication should take.

In recent decades, Korean communication and media have substantially grown to become some of the most significant segments of Korean society. Since the early 1990s, Korea has experienced several distinctive changes in its politics, economy, and technology, which are directly related to the development of local media and culture. Korea has greatly developed several cutting-edge technologies, such as smartphones, video games, and mobile instant messengers to become the most networked society throughout the world. As the Korean Wave exemplifies, the once small and peripheral Korea has also created several unique local popular cultures, including television programs, movies, and popular music, known as K-pop, and these products have penetrated many parts of the world. As Korean media and popular culture have rapidly grown, the number of media scholars and topics covering these areas in academic discourses has increased. These scholars’ interests have expanded from traditional media, such as Korean journalism and cinema, to several new cutting-edge areas, like digital technologies, health communication, and LGBT-related issues. In celebrating the Korean American Communication Association’s fortieth anniversary in 2018, this book documents and historicizes the growth of growing scholarship in the realm of Korean media and communication.

Transnational Korean Television: Cultural Storytelling and Digital Audience provides previously absent analyses of Korean TV dramas’ transnational influences, peculiar production features, distribution, and consumption to enrich the contextual understanding of Korean TV's transcultural mobility. Even as academic discussions about the Korean Wave have heated up, Korean television studies from transnational viewpoints often lack in-depth analysis and overlook the recently extended flow of Korean television beyond Asia. This book illustrates the ecology of Korean television along with the Korean Wave for the past two decades in order to showcase Korean TV dramas’ international mobility and its constant expansion with the different Western television and their audiences. Korean TV dramas’ mobility in crossing borders has been seen in both transnational and transcultural flows, and the book opens up the potential to observe the constant flow of Korean television content in new places, peoples, manners, and platforms around the world. Scholars of media studies, communication, cultural studies, and Asian studies will find this book especially useful.

This book investigates the meteoric rise of mobile webtoons – also known as webcomics – and the dynamic relationships between serialised content, artists, agencies, platforms and applications, as well as the global readership associated with them. It offers an engaging discussion of webtoons themselves, and what makes this new media form so compelling and attractive to millions upon millions of readers. Why have webtoons taken off, and how do users interact with them? Each of the case studies we explore raises interesting questions for both general readers and scholars of new media about how webtoons have become a modern form of popular culture. The book also addresses larger questions about East Asia’s contributions to global popular culture and Asian society in general, as well as South Korea’s rapid social and cultural transformation since the 1990s. This is a significant – and understudied – aspect of the new screen ecologies and their role in a new wave of media globalisation as we approach the end of the second decade of the 21st century.

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.

An engaging and comprehensive look at the Korean smartphone industry and culture

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.

"A representative book of contemporary Korean cultural studies!" This book introduces one remarkable media trend related to the influence of Korean media products in Asian countries and Western countries. Since the early 1990s, the popularity of Korean media products, including television dramas, songs, and movies has skyrocketed in Asian countries and beyond. The enormous wave of popularity of Korean pop culture is referred to as Hallyu, the Korean Wave. According to earlier studies, the influence of Hallyu has been unprecedented, affecting the domestic culture and international relations of Asian countries and reducing the dominance of Hollywood in the Asian media market. Furthermore, it has been constructing a cross-national identity of ready consumers of Korean popular culture. Investigating this remarkable media phenomenon, this book examines the influence of Hallyu from its origin to the present and attempts to predict its future. Many scholars of communication, sociology, history, and international relations have produced a growing amount of literature and research on the subject of Hallyu over the last several years. However, so far, few efforts have synthesized the Hallyu phenomenon comprehensively or traced the influence of Hallyu for the last decade. Having observed the influence of Hallyu across national borders and the need to synthesize Hallyu research from diverse perspectives, the editors designed this book with two main purposes: the first purpose was to analyze Hallyu from as many diverse perspectives as possible, and the second purpose was to present Korean perspectives on the Hallyu phenomenon by providing international readers with analyses by Korean scholars.

This book examines key features, problems, and implications of the 2016–2017 Candlelight Movement, a historical cornerstone for democracy and social movements in South Korea. The Candlelight Movement brought profound social changes with important lessons and questions for scholars, practitioners, activists, and the public. To examine the full complexity of the movement, this edited volume utilises wide-ranging methodological and theoretical approaches, which include case study approaches, ethnography, survey, feminist film criticism, critical discourse analysis, and rhetorical criticism. Chapters place ‘communication’ at the centre of their analyses, calling attention to the mediated and mediatised, the performative and other discursive practices of the 2016–2017 Candlelight Movement. In doing so, the book discusses not only the usual players and factors – nor the institutions that exert their influence through democratic politics and the public sphere – but also the counter-public embracing new and social media, collective singing, the body, and performance, as their choice of political media. As such, this volume offers important insights into how communication plays a critical role in forming, moving, and transforming new social movements. The Candlelight Movement, Democracy, and Communication in Korea will appeal to students and scholars of communication and media studies, political science, sociology, and Korean studies.

This book offers a thorough investigation of the recent surge of webtoons and manga/animation as the sources of transmedia storytelling for popular culture, not only in East Asia but in the wider global context. An international team of experts employ a unique theoretical framework of media convergence supported by transmedia storytelling, alongside historical and textual analyses, to examine the ways in which webtoons and anime become some of the major sources for transmedia storytelling. The book historicizes the evolution of regional popular culture according to the surrounding digital media ecology, driving the change and continuity of the manhwa industry over the past 15 years, and discusses whether cultural products utilizing transmedia storytelling take a major role as the primary local cultural product in the cultural market. Offering new perspectives on current debates surrounding transmedia storytelling in the cultural industries, this book will be of great interest to scholars and students of media studies, East Asian studies and cultural studies.