K-pop, described by Time Magazine in 2012 as "South Korea's greatest export", has rapidly achieved a large worldwide audience of devoted fans largely through distribution over the Internet. This book examines the phenomenon, and discusses the reasons for its success. It considers the national and transnational conditions that have played a role in K-pop's ascendancy, and explores how they relate to post-colonial modernisation, post-Cold War politics in East Asia, connections with the Korean diaspora, and the state-initiated campaign to accumulate soft power. As it is particularly concerned with fandom and cultural agency, it analyses fan practices, discourses, and underlying psychologies within their local habitus as well as in expanding topographies of online networks. Overall, the book addresses the question of how far "Asian culture" can be global in a truly meaningful way, and how popular culture from a "marginal" nation has become a global phenomenon.

K-pop, described by Time Magazine in 2012 as "South Korea's greatest export", has rapidly achieved a large worldwide audience of devoted fans largely through distribution over the Internet. This book examines the phenomenon, and discusses the reasons for its success. It considers the national and transnational conditions that have played a role in K-pop's ascendancy, and explores how they relate to post-colonial modernisation, post-Cold War politics in East Asia, connections with the Korean diaspora, and the state-initiated campaign to accumulate soft power. As it is particularly concerned with fandom and cultural agency, it analyses fan practices, discourses, and underlying psychologies within their local habitus as well as in expanding topographies of online networks. Overall, the book addresses the question of how far "Asian culture" can be global in a truly meaningful way, and how popular culture from a "marginal" nation has become a global phenomenon.

JungBong Choi characterizes Japan's introduction of digital broadcasting as a political, cultural and economic endeavor orchestrated by the Japanese state and other para-state institutions. In so doing the author employs a concept of "digitalization," as opposed to "digitization," defined as a social, institutional, and discursive making of digital television. With the analytic framework established, the author observes how the identity of television in Japan was renewed as an apparatus conducive to the acceleration of an informational capitalism. An innovative study in the political economy of media, the book brings to light ways in which digital technologies are engineered as a key device for socio-economic reordering. A stimulating appraisal of the contemorary state, furthermore, it offers a perspective on the progressive conflation between state and market, technology and institution, and cultural discourse and economic planning.