The Korean Wave Phenomenon in Asian Diasporas in Canada

ABSTRACT

This study explores diasporic Asian young people's engagement with the recent wave of Korean pop culture, also known as the Korean Wave, in Canada. Drawing on in-depth interviews conducted in Toronto and Vancouver, the study examines how transnational cultural flow is articulated with social media and ethnic sociality. In the study, while the transnational flow of Korean media content was largely reliant on social media, it was renegotiated by the users’ subject positions as ethnic minorities and by their ethnic networks in the Canadian cities.

KEYWORDS:

• The Korean Wave
• Asian Diaspora
• Ethnic Audience
• Social Media
• Transnational Cultural Flow

Notes on contributors

Kyong Yoon teaches in the Cultural Studies program at the University of British Columbia Okanagan. His recent research project concerns Asian migrants’ use of media in Canada.

Dal Yong Jin is Associate Professor in the School of Communication at Simon Fraser University. His major research and teaching interests are on social media and convergence, mobile technologies and game studies, globalization and media, transnational cultural studies, and the political economy of media and culture. He is the author of several books, such as New Korean wave: transnational cultural power in the age of social media (University of Illinois Press, in press 2016), Digital platforms, imperialism and political culture (Routledge, 2015), and Korea's online gaming empire (MIT Press, 2010).

Notes

1. The increasing popularity of reality program formats in the Korean broadcast media is a recent phenomenon that has been stimulated by cable channels’ introduction of the format around 2008. Due to the lack of budget and expertise to compete with the networks, Korean cable channels have invested in reality shows targeting niche markets. Once cable channels’ reality programs became extremely popular, networks also adopted this trend, and thus the format has constituted a dominant genre in the Korean Wave (Yoon et al. 2014).