PAP0667 - Ro-Hallyu: The influence of Korean wave in Romania

The “Koreean wave” is a cultural phenomenon specific to Asia and it refers to the impact of cultural products from Korea (music, movies, TV series) on that part of the world (Dator and Seo, 2004; Endo and Matsumoto, 2004; Seo, 2005). For the Romanian society the exposure at the K-drama and Koreean popular culture’s type of products is a very recent phenomenon that started in the summer of 2009 when the national television service broadcasted the first K-drama: “Jewelry of the Palace”. The “experiment” was a successful one, other twenty Korean “dramas” being broadcasted until present. The main reason for this editorial decision of the national television was the dramatic increase of this TV channel’s audience during the broadcasting of this type of cultural. At the same time, one of the Romanian TV musical channel (U-TV) started to weekly broadcast one hour of K-Pop music at the national level and the number of Romanian active K-Pop fan groups increased on the internet (there are around forty-five K-Pop fan-groups on-line active at present in Romania). The present study analyses the reception of the Korean cultural products in Romania. We were interested on one hand to identify the underlying reasons that lead a part of the Romanian public to view this type of cultural products, and, on the other, to offer some tentative answers at the research questions. The research questions of the study were: 1. What is the influence of the Korean popular culture products on the Romanians’ perceptions and representations about Asia culture and society? 2. What are the factors that explain the increasing popularity of this type of cultural products among Romanian audience? In order to answer at the above-mentioned questions we used a set of twenty interviews with Romanian viewers of Korean TV series and a survey made on 250 K-Pop Romanian fans. The results proved Liebes and Katz’s thesis about the cultural reasons underlying the media consumption in the case of Romanian audience (Katz, Liebes 1985: 188; Katz, Liebes 1986; Katz, Liebes 1988. Furthermore, the same set of data aimed at the “glocal” character of Korean cultural products

Valentina Marinescu, PhD in Sociology, (Structural-functional transformation of the relation between media and society in Romania after 1990, University of Bucharest) is Associate professor at the University of Bucharest – Faculty of Sociology and Social Work. She teaches undergraduate and graduate courses in media and society, and methods of researching mass communication. Her interests lie in media and gender studies in Eastern Europe, particularly in Romania. She was a fellow of Universite de Montreal (Canada), University of British Columbia (Canada) and Academy of Korean Studies (South Korea). She has also published articles and book chapters on mass media, communication, gender and popular culture (Shade of Violence: The Media Role, Women’s Studies, International Forum, Elsevier; Challenges of the european information market and Romanian investigative journalism, in Alec Charles (ed.) “Media in the Enlarged Europe”, Intellect Publishers Inc. 2009; Communication and Women in Eastern Europe: Challenges in Reshaping the Democratic Sphere. in Leslie Regan Shade, Katharine Sarikakis (eds.), “Feminist International Communication Studies”, Rowman and Littlefield Publisers Inc. 2007)..