Digital Media and Imperial Formations: The 2012 Lady Gaga Controversy in South Korea

South Korea frequently is regarded as standing at the vanguard of the digital revolution, and its status as perhaps the world's most wired society makes it a fruitful case study for considering how digital culture may develop. South Korea's reputation rests in part on statistics that place it at the global forefront in terms of broadband penetration and internet speed – that is, its infrastructural ‘hardware’ – but it is equally in the cultural expression of Korea's engagement with digital media – its ‘software’ – that the nation evinces characteristics that call for attention. Compressed modernisation in South Korea has brought about contestation over acceptable behaviour, and several recent incidents highlight the thorny negotiation of cultural practice in the Web 2.0 era. This article focuses on two interrelated phenomena: first, the use of digital media to confront convention and foster activism; and second, an opposing desire to police violations of norms, often at the expense of invasion of privacy and human rights.

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“Humanities Content” and Its Discontent

Digital Humanities and Scholarly Research Trends in the Asia-Pacific - Advances in Human and Social Aspects of Technology ◽

10.4018/978-1-5225-7195-7.ch006 ◽

2019 ◽

pp. 118-139

Author(s):

Yongsoo Kim

Keyword(s):

South Korea ◽

Digital Media ◽

Digital Humanities ◽

Culture Industry ◽

Computer Assisted ◽

Building Projects ◽

South Korean ◽

History Of ◽

Contemporary Development ◽

Humanities Landscape

This chapter provides an overview of the remarkable but peculiar history of digital humanities and its contemporary development in South Korea. Computer-assisted humanities research in Korean studies began with the Wagner-Song Munkwa Project, which was launched in 1967 and lasted for more than three decades. This landmark achievement inspired many database-building projects, including the Sillok Project, in the following years. In the early 2000s, as a new discourse of “digital humanities” emerged in response to the “crisis” of the humanities in South Korean academia, another effort to connect the humanities through digital media to the culture industry gained momentum. “Humanities content” has since dominated the South Korean digital humanities landscape for over a decade. While recovering major digital humanities-related accomplishments, this chapter reveals that constant tension between the non-commercial, academic digital humanities and the commercial, industrial humanities content has been shaping and reshaping computer-assisted humanities scholarship in South Korea.

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A Gaga-World Pageant

The Oxford Handbook of Sound and Image in Digital Media ◽

10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199757640.013.010 ◽

2013 ◽

pp. 533-550

Author(s):

David McCarthy ◽

María E. Zauzu

Keyword(s):

Digital Media ◽

Close Reading ◽

Privileged Position ◽

Youtube Videos ◽

Meaningful Relationships ◽

Lady Gaga ◽

Networked Society

This article appears in the Oxford Handbook of Sound and Image in Digital Media edited by Carol Vernallis, Amy Herzog, and John Richardson. Lady Gaga and her collaborators released a series of YouTube videos between 2009 and 2012 in the form of a coherent pageant orchestrated to claim a privileged position in a networked society. This article presents a close reading of this pageant as a whole, paying special attention to meaningful relationships among the pop star’s iconography, rhetoric, musical tropes, audio effects, and digital practices. The Gaga World has been crafted in ways that resonate with popular contemporary conceptions of society, providing Gaga with an apparent timeliness. This affords the cultural critic with a kind of text for considering a set of political contradictions that are otherwise obscured by a rhetoric that deploys ideas about ostensibly nonhierarchical and democratic networks.

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Going Gaga for Glitch

The Oxford Handbook of Sound and Image in Digital Media ◽

10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199757640.013.003 ◽

2013 ◽

pp. 126-139 ◽

Cited By ~ 1

Author(s):

Caetlin Benson-Allott

Keyword(s):

Digital Media ◽

Critical Reflection ◽

Music Videos ◽

Music Video ◽

Male Gaze ◽

Adobe Flash ◽

Online Music ◽

Temporal Structures ◽

Lady Gaga ◽

Drop Outs

This article appears in the Oxford Handbook of Sound and Image in Digital Media edited by Carol Vernallis, Amy Herzog, and John Richardson. During the ascension and commodification of Web 2.0, online music videos became host to a new kind of glitch: the digital stutter of insufficient buffering in Adobe Flash Player and other streaming media software. Some female performers recognized the potential of this electronic disruption to interrupt the male gaze and the traditional objectification of the female body. Working inside the genre of corporate music video and the logic of the glitch, performers like Madonna and Lady Gaga make visible their ambivalent relationships to patriarchal, heterocentric video culture through simulated freezes and drop outs in the streaming image. These “errors” open up intervals of frustration—and potential critical reflection—in the playback and, by extension, in the temporal structures of fantasy. In so doing, they remind the viewer that although she may perceive female music video stars as objects of fantasy, as fantasies they are not always under her control.

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Introduction: ASIA.LIVE: Inaugurating Livestream Studies in Asia

Asiascape Digital Asia ◽

10.1163/22142312-12340129 ◽

2021 ◽

Vol 8 (1-2) ◽

pp. 5-14

Author(s):

Ge Zhang ◽

Gabriele de Seta

Keyword(s):

Hong Kong ◽

South Korea ◽

Digital Media ◽

Future Research ◽

Special Issue ◽

Central Concept ◽

Asian Region ◽

Digital Cultures

Abstract This introduction to the special issue ‘ASIA.LIVE: Inaugurating Livestream Studies in Asia’ briefly summarizes the virtual workshop at which it originated and describes its contributions to the central concept of liveness. After reflecting on the increasingly constitutive role of liveness in digital media, we argue that research on livestreaming should move beyond its focus on gaming and its Eurocentric approach to platforms, drawing on extensive debates over liveness and expanding its scope to the thriving digital economies in the Asian region. To understand how practices such as livestreaming are changing digital cultures in Asia and beyond, it is necessary to account for the ephemeral phenomena and under-documented practices that emerge from these regional contexts. By bringing together articles about China and Taiwan and relating them to workshop contributions about Hong Kong, Indonesia, and South Korea, we inaugurate livestream studies in Asia and offer some directions for future research in this field.

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Hating journalism: Anti-press discourse and negative emotions toward journalism in Korea

Journalism ◽

10.1177/1464884920985729 ◽

2020 ◽

pp. 146488492098572

Author(s):

Wooyeol Shin ◽

Changwook Kim ◽

Jaewon Joo

Keyword(s):

South Korea ◽

Digital Media ◽

Hate Speech ◽

Negative Emotions ◽

Korean Society ◽

Its Analysis ◽

The Press ◽

Probable Impact

In South Korea since the mid-2010s, the discourse on giraegi has prevailed. The word giraegi is a combination of gija, the Korean word for journalist, and tsuraegi, the Korean word for trash. By considering this distinctive discourse on giraegi as a negative emotional form of anti-press discourse, this paper explores the background logics and rationales behind the giraegi discourse that classifies journalists as trash, by focusing on the case of the networked public of # giraegi. Its analysis reveals that certain negative emotions toward the press – disgust, hate, and shame – are the sources of the formation and maintenance of the networked public of # giraegi and also the energy that directs the flow of their hostile messages about journalists and journalism. Moreover, journalists are considered ‘pollutants’ that tarnish Korean society and thereby something that needs to be eliminated. In connection with the growing research on hate speech against journalists on digital media, this research ultimately argues that this affective form of anti-journalistic discourse – mainly focusing on hate, disgust, and shame – can hardly bring about normative and constructive effects; its probable impact will be to exacerbate distrust and skepticism toward journalists and journalism itself.

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