Rendering Diversity: Multilingual Representations in Korean New Media

Shin, Haerin; Shin, Haerin

<Rendering Diversity: Multilingual Representations in Korean New Media> explores multilingualism in Korean new media across form and content. Riding the mobile boom of recent years, new media platforms, services, and content have become key channels whereby linguistically diverse communities voice their presence. While the growing popularity of hallyu and the purportedly lower threshold to access appear to cultivate polyphonic expressions on new media platforms, minority communities that fall outside the two-dimensional coordinates of linguistic binarism-- national or (preferred types of) foreign, audiovisual than tactile, or standard over dialect -- still struggle with the absence of, mis-, or under-representation. Seeking ways to render multi-dimensional presences beyond such 2D models of linguistic hegemony, this session introduces papers that explore the presence and representation of language along the parameters of difference as equitable diversity rather than hierarchized differentiation in Korean new media. More specifically, the session mobilizes multilingualism as lived experience on a polyvalent level, looking at communities, mechanism, design, and representation of mediated diversity across topics that range from K-pop fandom to web-based platforms, television drama, and Hangŭl .

Multilingual interfaces/content and their socio-cultural implications are key drivers of Hallyu (Korean Wave) fandom, given how the experiential dimension of fan culture heavily relies on, and explicitly (at times) targets overseas audiences. Calling attention to how linguistically mediated instants racial dissonance, appropriation, and neglect are raising concern in Hallyu content/UI (user interface)/UX (user experience) of late, Kristin April Kim’s paper takes a deep-dive into the world of global K-pop fandom to investigate the complex dynamic of cultural reclamation and appropriation. Through a series of interviews and discourse analysis, Kim problematizes Hallyu’s aspirations to celebratory hybridity, pointing out that it may yield erasures of racial identity, alienating the very fans who map K-pop onto the global mediascape.

Sang Keun Yoo’s paper enriches the panel’s intersectional approach by expanding Kim’s focus on race, culture, and ethnicity to gender, nationality, and regional specificity (dialects) in his discussion of various media channels. Drawing on the medium-specificities of television genres as well as sonic and visual platforms such as Clubhouse and video streaming services like YouTube, Yoo takes a close look at emergent linguistic practices in user-producer dynamics, feeling out the contours of persistant digital divides across transgender and North Korean refugee presence.

Shedding a more positive light on fandom agency to ensure a balanced approach in the panel’s treatment of the new media ecology from a multivalent perspective, Dharshani Lakmali Jayasinghe’s paper links Kim and Yoo’s exploration of Hallyu prosumers by attending to the concept of virtual communities in her study on fan blogs. Emphasizing the crucial role of new media infrastructure in Hallyu’s distributive mechanism, Jayasinghe explores user-driven subtitling initiatives that transform acts of linguistic remediation into generative sites of multicultural production in her close readings of choice blogs and the media content they revolve around.

Jenny Wang Medina, meanwhile, takes multimodality across and beyond networked representations in the digital domain, zeroing in on Hangŭl as the building block that undergird the varied dimensions of communication and interaction in the above three papers. Making note of recent trends in Korea’s architectural design schemes whereby the physical constitution of Hangŭl gestures to a perspectival transition from semiotic hermeneutics to representational embodiment, Medina suggests that such instances of extratextual spatialization open up the possibility of a shared affective experience in trans-linguistic communitas.

Each presenter will speak for fifteen minutes, leaving ample time for an open Q&A with the audience. Although disparate in their topical foci, all four papers uniformly point to multi-faceted interfaces between media, platforms, languages, and cultures, challenging hegemonic constructs of linguistic hierarchy in their emphasis on the agential roles of human and nonhuman interfaces.

342V Rendering Diversity: Multilingual Representations in Korean New Media: Calls for Papers