Creative & Critical Studies

This article, based on ethnographic research in Seoul, South Korea, proposes a 'peripheral' and local perspective on teenage mobile phone users and sociality. The teenage users show that the mobile phone, which has often been represented as an example of global imagination technologies, is here appropriated in localized ways in which the traditional form of sociality, 'Cheong', is rearticulated. After reviewing the recent literature on young people's identity formation in relation to globalization, the article explores the way in which the mobile phone is appropriated as a means of extending traditional sociality between peers and family members.

This article addresses how young people are represented in popular discourses of mobile phone technology and what this representation implies for the local positioning of youth. After reviewing the ways in which representations of youth and technology have been discussed in previous studies, the current research analyzes different discursive constructions of young mobile phone users in South Korea between 1997 and 2002. The study has found that the different streams of discourse in government documents, the mass media and consumer culture appear to reflect widespread anxieties in Korea about becoming involved in 'global' material culture and seek to counter this tendency through rearticulating hegemonic social relations.

An increasing number of young people are making long-stay travels while postponing their transition to adulthood and seeking ‘global experience’. Among various forms of long-stay travel, the working holiday has been popular among young people looking for opportunities to work during travel. In order to empirically explore how global experience is negotiated by young travellers, this study analyses the narratives of 30 South Korean working holidaymakers in Toronto, Canada. The in-depth interviews reveal that the working holiday in Canada is considered by its participants to be a process of seeking the ‘true self’ and a way of enhancing social mobility, both of which lead to a sense of self-development. Drawing upon the empirical findings, the article suggests that the discourse of self-development naturalises a particular mode of neoliberal subjectivity and thus standardises the practice of global experience.

This study explores how transnational working holiday makers imagine and negotiate their identity positions in ethno-racial structures of the host society. Drawing on qualitative interviews with 53 Korean working holiday makers in Canada, the study addresses how the young people are racialized by being exposed to the 'white gaze' and re-ethnicized by engaging with the Korean diaspora. The study examines how the transnational mobility of working holidays both breaks from and continues the mobile subjects' ethno-racial identity. The study's findings contribute to the understanding of the racial dimensions of working holiday making, a largely overlooked topic in previous tourism studies.

This study analyses the popular teaching evaluation site RateMyProfessors.com as a social, technological and cultural form of the digital reputation society. The site's socioeconomic context shows the process of media integration and commodification, while its technological aspect reveals the salience of certain pedagogic features, such as easiness, clarity, standard and entertainment. In comparison, the site's reviewer postings show how rating subjects may negotiate its socioeconomic and technological features. The empirical analysis addresses the limitations and possibilities of the participatory culture that emerges in the digital reputation society.

This study examines the ‘overseas working holiday phenomenon’ in Korea, drawing on a content analysis of policy and media discourses and qualitative interviews with Korean working holidaymakers in Canada. The study reveals a significant disjuncture between popular representations of transnational mobility and the participants' actual experiences of it. The process of repackaging youth as a potentially ‘global generation’ in the recent discourse of the working holiday phenomenon in Korea implies that transnational mobility can be a discursive construct that may conceal the immobility of a particular group of people, such as youth. The study argues that transnational mobility should be reconsidered as a symbolic and lived process in which national issues are negotiated and contested.

Drawing on in-depth interviews with the young adult children of South Korean transnational families in Canada, this chapter explores how the family is reimagined in the mediated, mobile, transnational communication between family members. In the chapter, the smartphone is examined as an assemblage involving earlier media forms and experiences and is thus contextualized in relation to other information communication technologies (ICTs). In addition, the present study addresses the popular use of the Korean-developed communication app, KakaoTalk, among the transnational family members. Furthermore, it explores how the smartphone engages with the preexisting norms of family communication. The research offers insight into how family interaction is technologically mediated across transnational contexts while questioning the technologically deterministic perspective that overestimates the role of mobile technologies in transnational virtual families.

(Book chapter, in press) Mobile Communication and the Family - Asian Experiences in Technology Domestication,  Springer (edited by Sun Sun Lim).

Jeong, which can be defined as a particular state of mind that arises from family-like relationships, is a cultural norm that governs social interaction in Korea. In the midst of the florishing discourse regarding the evolution of information and communication technologies (ICTs), jeong-based relationships appear to remain a badge of collective identity amongst South Koreans. This chapter explores how the affective local sociality of jeong is signified and practised in Koreans’ use of ICTs. In particular, two aspects of jeong–sociality and emotion–are examined. In so doing, the chapter discusses how the concept can contribute to illuminating Asians’ media practices. The chapter suggests that the local norm of jeong may not necessarily fade away with the emergence of mediated communication, and thus it is important to address how the local norm is integrated with emerging media environments.

This study explores how young Korean migrants appropriate information and communication technologies (ICTs) in Canada. Drawing on qualitative interview data, the study focuses on Korean ‘digital generation’ immigrants who grew up with the rapid development of the ICT industry in Korea. By addressing the specific demographic of young migrants who have already been saturated by digital media in their pre-migration childhood, the study explores how the young people’s memories of earlier digital media use are articulated with their adoption of newer media forms during the post-migration period.

Drawing on qualitative interviews with South Korean migrants in Canada,
this study examines how full-time working migrants appropriate the Internet to maintain
sociocultural connections with their homeland, their diasporic community, and the
host society. The present study raises the question of how the rapid diffusion of the
Internet may redefine the meanings of the Korean diaspora, and it explores how
migrants engage in, or negotiate, the digital mediascape of the host society. While
Korean migrants in the present study encountered no difficulty with accessing and
using the Internet, it was largely appropriated in Korean language and in relation to
Korean community rather than serving as a platform through which they could actively
engage in the host society’s mediascape. Thus, it is questionable how the ethnic use of
the Internet may contribute to the co-construction between migrant and host media
users.

This study explores how young people in transnational contexts use communication applications (apps) through mobile platforms built into the smartphone. Drawing on qualitative interviews with young adults from transnational South Korean families in Canada, the study examines how young people use, and create meanings with, different apps in transnational contexts. In the study, the participants frequently used the Korean-based mobile platform of Kakao, as well as the globally popular Facebook, to mediate different human networks and emotions. By appropriating different mobile platforms, they sought to widen their peer networks in Canada and to maintain diasporic ties with their country of origin and/or ethnic communities in the host society. The young Koreans’ negotiation of the different app platforms illustrates a unique process of global–local and cultural–technological articulations in the appropriation of technology.

Drawing on qualitative interviews with Canadian-based K-pop (contemporary South Korean “idol pop” music) fans, this study discusses how transnational fans experience and interpret K-pop as a form of cultural hybridity that facilitates global imagination. In particular, the study explores how fans consume and translate transnational pop music while engaging with different modes of global imagination in their everyday lives. In so doing, the study contributes to a better understanding of the text and context of K-pop from the lens of audiences’ negotiation with globalization.

Drawing on qualitative interview data, this study examines the cultural translation of K-pop in Canada. By focusing on Canadian youth of Asian descent, who are relatively marginalized in the dominant Canadian mediascape yet considered a main segment of K-pop fandom in Canada, the study closely examines how racial and affective affinities of K-pop are translated and negotiated by young fans. In the study, young Asian Canadian fans challenged the racial stereotyping of K-pop as the other of dominant Western pop culture by positively redefining racial meanings attached to K-pop. Meanwhile, they affectively identified with K-pop idols via the extensive use of social media, and thus internalize a particular mode of subjectivity through which individuals willingly seek the model of a self-developing, entrepreneurial self.