The social mediascape of transnational Korean pop culture: Hallyu 2.0 as spreadable media practice

While it has been more than 15 years since the Korean pop culture phenomenon known as the Korean wave or hallyu emerged, academic analyses have not sufficiently addressed its dimension as a media environment from a global perspective. In this regard, drawing on qualitative interviews with North American fans of the recent Korean wave, this study explores how the hallyu phenomenon is integrated into a social media-driven cultural landscape, which will be referred to as the social mediascape. The social mediascape of hallyu reveals that the technological affordances of social media platforms and fans’ sociality interplay with each other, resulting in the rapid spread of hallyu as a set of impure cultural forms.