ASA 002 A03
11/01/2015
Having grown up in the bay area, I have certainly witnessed the rapid growing presence of the Korean entertainment industry. Many of the coffee shops and restaurants in my city play Korean music and television dramas, even if the shops themselves aren’t Korean. There’s a Korean music station on the radio and a Korean news channel on TV, and I’ve recently noticed that Korean music has become an option on the music playlist on airplanes. Park’s article says Asian American youth play a critical role in the transnational circulation of products and information since they have the power to disseminate and mediate cultural information across borders. In psychology class, we learned about the mere-exposure effect phenomenon by which people tend to develop a preference for things and people merely because they are more familiar with them. I think that by this phenomenon, America’s perception towards Asians is changing and this global exposure is fighting the stereotypical character roles of awkward brainiacs and math geeks that Asian Americans have been constantly assigned to. It’s interesting to see Park explain that the increasing visibility of South Korean popular culture in the US is partially interrelated with the “nation-building” ideologies and policies proposed in the early 1990s. Reading this article reminds me of the Taiwanese entertainment industry which grew globally popular in the earlier 2000s, but has taken a step back from the global scene today. What caused the Taiwanese entertainment industry to fall back from worldwide popularity, and is the Korean wave in danger of this too?
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