Hybridization of Korean popular culture: films and online gaming

Abstract

Korean popular culture has been considered a very distinctive non-Western culture in the global market as well as the regional market. Two cultural genres – Korean cinema and online gaming – have been unique due in large part to the degree of their appearance in the global markets. The global penetration of these cultural products – one in the audiovisual sector and the other in the new media sector – is noteworthy, given that these two cultural products have rapidly grown, based on their canny appropriation of cultural globalization, known as hybridity. As local-based cultural industries, they have utilized hybridization as one of the most important production strategies in order to penetrate the global and the regional markets. From storytelling to special effects, and from hiring local staffs to adopting local cultural taste, these two cultural genres have vehemently developed hybridization strategies. Interestingly enough, these two cultural products have shown very differentresults in the global cultural markets in the early twenty-first century. Korean films alongside television programs had been among the most significant cultural genres driving the Korean Wave in the first several years of the 2000s; however, they have experienced a deep recession in very recent years. Contrary to this, domestic online gaming has been a latecomer on the bandwagon of the Korean Wave; however, the online game industry has rapidly increased its export to the global markets and has enjoyed massive popularity. Although hybridization has not been the sole factor for the growth and/or the fall of local popular culture in the global markets, it is significant to understand the nature of hybridization appropriated in the production of local popular culture and its implications to the local cultural industries, because hybridization has become the most significant approach that many local cultural producers are increasingly relying on in the globalized society. This chapter documents the hybridization process of local popular culturewith cases of Korean cinema and online gaming. It investigates the hybridization process of these two cultural genres in order to understand whether local popular culture has been influenced by Western norms or whether the process has created local cultural products that are representing and promoting local culture. This chapter maps out whether hybridity has created the thirdculture, which is resisting Western dominance in the realm of local culture, by analyzing hybridized Korean films and online games. It finally articulates whether hybridity embedded in local popular culture can reduce an asymmetrical power relationship in the realm of culture between Western (mainly the U.S.) and non-Western (primarily developing) countries.