Lanham; Boulder; New York; London: Lexington Books [an imprint of The Rowman and Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc.], 2018. xxiii, 507 pp. (Tables, B&W photos.) US$140.00, cloth. ISBN 978-1-4985-6203-4.
The small country of South Korea is a media and technology giant. Korean films have received accolades at prestigious international film festivals, Korean pop music (K-pop) groups have sold out concerts abroad, and Korean consumer goods are at the forefront of technological innovation. The emergence of Korean soft power is remarkable since, as Dal Yong Jin and Nojin Kwak point out in the introduction to their enterprising edited volume, Communication, Digital Media, and Popular Culture in Korea, the country was late to the media and technology game when compared to other developing nations in the mid-twentieth century. English-language Korean communication, media, and culture scholarship has advanced in tandem, and so to commemorate the 40th Anniversary of the Korean American Communication Association (KACA) in 2018, Jin and Kwak introduce this guide with the goal of fostering a historically based understanding of the contemporary changes in the Korean communication industries in relation to the global cultural markets.
To this end, the book is organized into five parts, consisting of 18 chapters that have been contributed by experts in each subject area. The first chapter under Part I: Institutionalization of Korean Communication seeks to answer the question as to whether the KACA has become a full-fledged academic community by providing analyses of the top-cited papers penned by the organization’s members. This catalog is followed by two chapters: an incisive historical look at Korean communication law research and a review of political economy literature, in which the author counsels scholars to keep a critical eye on the Korean mediascape due to the country’s open throttle entrance into the twenty-first century.
The lens of political economy is one way to look at power relationships, but the contributors also bring other perspectives to light in part 2, “Communication Systems.” The section begins with an essay in which the triadic interactions model is applied to Korean information and communication technology (ICT) research contiguous with government, media, and the public. One of the components of this essay is citizen journalism, which provides a segue into a treatise on the history of Korean journalism and its roles in Korean politics and society. The essay confirms that young people tend to favour mobile technologies for news and entertainment. Thus, it is sensible that part 2 is rounded out with an essay that examines and classifies three decades of Korean communication and technology studies.
Technology is not centre stage in part 3, “Public Communication,” but technologies are present since they are essential for disseminating such communication. The first essay in this section is a content analysis that reveals five findings, stipulating a course for future Korean health communication research. Next, the discussion proceeds into the realm of Korean advertising research, uncovering its characteristics, identifying issues and trends, and mapping out a chronology. This interrogation, then, flows into a thematic analysis of Korean public relations research.
Turning the focus back to technology in part 4, the editors configure an examination of digital media. The first essay presents a critical review of how Korean digital media has been addressed in the academic literature, and this is succeeded by an essay charting the research that has been published alongside Korea’s immense growth in the digital games industry. After exploring the virtual, the third essay in this section moves into physical spaces with a historical review of urban communication studies with respect to Korean American communities. This section comes to a close with an exploration of the very small, but growing area of Korean visual communication, with photojournalism at its core.
While some scholars scrutinize visual artifacts, others observe wider systems in society. Therefore, part 5 investigates the topic of cultural studies, and this inquiry begins with an assessment of the intercultural communication literature concerning the changing face of Korea, both in terms of its cultural shift from traditional to contemporary values and its growing multiculturalism. This multiculturalism is apparent in sports as explained in the next essay on the subject of sports communication. While the amount of literature on sports-related topics indicates that it is a popular area of study, the author of the chapter on LGBT studies finds quite the opposite, with only 30 articles to examine. What has received abundant attention in recent years, however, is Hallyu, meaning the Korean wave. Therefore, the chapter on this Korean pop-culture phenomenon recounts its history and discusses its domestic and international significance, with its influence even crossing the border into North Korea. Under the Hallyu umbrella is film, but since this industry pre-dates the division of the peninsula, it is given its own chapter and its own investigation through the present day.
Jin and Kwak have assembled a set of essays that are brimming with hard facts and sapid data, and true to their goals, this volume showcases the many important contributions scholars have made that, when taken together, convey a vivid story of Korea’s emergence as a global leader in entertainment and engineering. There is a downtrodden theme across the essays since Korean topics have sometimes been undervalued in the academe (as asserted in chapter 2); since Korea itself has been viewed in the diminutive (chapter 10); and since subfields such as game studies remain Western-centric despite advances in Korean communication research (chapter 11). These criticisms are a collective strength of this project, but where it falls short is in the general absence of reflexive resources, since this world view and its accompanying postmodern methods have not taken root in the KACA. For any other paradigm, however, this volume will serve as a rare English-language reference for Korea-related communication scholarship, ensuring this publication’s role as a building block for future studies.
Sherri L. Ter Molen
DePaul University, Chicago, USA