Keywords

1 Introduction

In the early twenty-first century, social media has played a key role in disseminating the popular culture of both Western countries and non-Western countries. Local popular cultures produced by cultural producers and corporations in non-Western countries, including South Korea (hereafter Korea), are especially benefiting from the rise of social media, because global fans of popular culture have been enjoying locally-produced popular cultures, including music, television dramas, and films on various social media, such as YouTube , Facebook, and Viki., Consequently, the emergence of social media indicates one of the most significant breakthroughs in both dissemination and consumption in popular culture.

Previously, there were certainly significant networks , including broadcasting, for people to enjoy cultural products, and “the relationship between culture and networks” has been crucial in the dissemination of popular culture (Arora 2012, 601). However, in the 2010s, social media as a new form of network has played a major role in creating the nexus between culture and networks. As “culture has shifted in being viewed as national character, value and identity to that which is local practice, discourse and meaning, network has also evolved in its meaning from stable and static systems causing action to structures that are dynamic, negotiating and culturally embedded” (Arora 2012, 601). Therefore, investigations of social networks have been conducted in relation to the culture (Lopez 2003, cited in Arora 2012).

As Huat and Jung (2014, 417) point out, the new network , of course in this case social media, is rather unique because “newly arisen grassroots-led bottom-up distribution through social media networks has played a significant role in the rapid rise of transnational flows of information , images, sounds, symbols and ideas.” People around the world easily and massively access social media, such as social network sites (SNSs) and user-generated content (UGC) sharing sites (e.g., YouTube ) on PC or smartphones, to relish global popular culture. Although social media does not totally replace the traditional form of cultural flow on old networks, as a type of export and import of cultural materials, it has certainly supplemented the latter, and therefore, global audiences now enjoy quick and easy access to popular culture coming from other countries, both Western and non-Western. This new cultural distribution paradigm “enables once marginalized pop content like Asian popular cultures to easily cross national boundaries” (Huat and Jung 2014, 417–418).

Most of all, the Korean wave (Hallyu in Korean ), symbolizing the sudden growth of the Korean cultural industries and the penetration of Korea’s popular culture in terms of audio-visual and digital cultures in the Asian cultural markets, followed by Western cultural markets, has recently changed the way of cultural flows in conjunction with social media (Kim 2013; Jung and Shim 2014; Lee and Nornes 2015; Jin 2016). While the Korean cultural industries have continued to export their cultural products, such as television dramas, films , and digital games, the rise of social media has fundamentally reshaped the nature of the Hallyu phenomenon among global fans. Indeed, we have seen many global fans consuming Korean popular culture through social media such as YouTube , Facebook, and Instagram in the 2010s (Jung 2011; Jung and Shim 2014; Jin and Yoon 2016).

The above phenomenon helps us understand new possibilities and strategies of cultural policy of the nation-state . While cultural policy has not solely focused on social media, the Korean government has certainly advanced several key policy measures in advancing Hallyu in many parts of the world in the age of social media.

This chapter documents the recent development characterizing the Korean wave in tandem with the cultural industries in the age of social media. It especially discusses the increasing role of social media and changing media consumption habits in the Korean wave transition and the Korean cultural policy’s active responses to it. In doing so, the chapter investigates the roles the nation-state can play in this shifting new media-led cultural market environment. Through a case study of the newly emerging policy in this area, the chapter sheds light on the complex nature of neoliberal cultural policy, where neoliberal agendas such as economic discourse of culture are closely tied to the active intervention of the state in the affairs of culture.

2 Dynamics of the Nation-States and the Cultural Industries amid Neoliberal Reforms

Over the past several decades, state cultural policy on the cultural industries and global flows of cultural products have been mainly concerned with fostering and supporting the production of television dramas, documentaries, feature films , and other forms of audiovisual content like music by domestic producers. Two main thrusts to this type of policy making globally have existed. “The first has been support for production—either through direct government funding or through tax incentives aiding the production of individual television programs and films. Second, a complementary regulatory thrust has typically mandated levels and varieties of local content and encouraged production by companies independent of major broadcasters” (O’Regan and Goldsmith 2006, 68). Similarly, screen quota and program quota have been key policy tools in this area.

However, since the mid-1990s, the global trade in cultural goods and services has been influenced by neoliberal globalization and new media technologies , namely digital technologies . Many countries around the world have experienced neoliberal reforms, including liberalization of their cultural industries, and consequently cross-border consumption of cultural products has rapidly increased in the global cultural markets. This means that cultural policy partially, if not entirely, ceased to have the attention of governments in the way it once did over the latter part of the 1990s. As Bennett (1995) argued, cultural policy and subsidy was previously justified within the context of national cultural identity and social welfare. However, as neoliberal globalization has emerged, cultural policy has much shifted, changing the focus of attention away from cultural policies themselves toward the context within which they exist. In other words, cultural policy does not operate in isolation from broader pressures within our contemporary society, and we need to understand socio-economic and political environments surrounding the development of cultural policies within particular times (Gray 1996; 2007, 205). In this regard, O’Regan and Goldsmith (2006, 70) claim;

long-established government commitments to the direct and indirect support of cultural production have come under pressure as governments seek to come to terms with changing market conditions and new priorities for the allocation of state revenues. Whereas governmental attention is focused on “reducing the size of government” (in reality, allocating the funds “saved” elsewhere to new initiatives), the funds available for cultural policy and therefore film policy have become increasingly contingent on the capacity of recipients to attract finance from the private sector and to deliver commercially successful outcomes.

In the midst of neoliberal globalization , many nation-states have to reduce their roles as major players in the realm of cultural flows. As Friedman (1982, 2–3) clearly pointed out, “the foundation of neoliberalism is the creation of policies that maximize the role of markets and profit making while minimizing the role of non-market institutions, through deregulation and privatization, the government’s power must be limited while the private companies operate their maximum freedom in a free market.” This ideological trend of neoliberalism that has swept over most of the world in the last two decades has had a substantial impact on cultural policies (Jin 2016).

Many countries, including Korea, have no choice but to develop neoliberal cultural policies demanded by global forces, in particular, the U.S. and international governance systems, including the WTO (World Trade Organization) and the IMF (International Monetary Fund), focusing on limited government interventions in the cultural industries and global trade. Neoliberalism is a political ideology as well as an economic practice (Friedman 1982; McChesney 2008), where the role of the government in the realm of culture is expected to significantly decrease.

In addition, the increasing role of digital media and now social media has potentially reduced the fundamental function of the government as Ohmae (1995) already pointed out, because the well-informed citizens of a global marketplace would not wait passively until nation states deliver tangible movements in the lifestyle. In other words, citizens get enough information for their own life from digital media/social media, and therefore, they do act properly in several dimensions, resulting in the decreasing role of the government. For example, in domestic politics, citizens are increasingly organizing rallies and petitions after having enough information and knowledge through social media in order to influence government affairs. The increasing use of social media in the realm of popular culture also implies that cultural flow and consumption today can go easily beyond the existing framework of government policy and regulation .

In opposition to those common expectations, the Korean government has developed its distinguishable, expansionist cultural policies. Although it is not directly related to the enhancement of cultural diversity, the Korean government has advanced substantive supports to the country’s cultural industries and their competition in the global cultural trade, primarily through both legal and financial arms. The Korean government since the mid-1990s has deregulated the cultural industries based on its neoliberal norms; however, it has, either directly or indirectly, supported the cultural sector, making Hallyu into a showcase window display that policy makers and media scholars need to carefully analyze when it comes to the changing role of the government (Jin 2016). Korea, “which was once a representative East Asian developmental state,” has continued to pursue state-interventionism in the realm of popular culture (Heo 2015, 351).

In more recent years, the Korean government has especially developed new cultural policies in order to reflect the rapid growth of digital media and/or social media, including policy measures related to copyright and online piracy issues, while establishing several financial supporting mechanisms to support the Korean wave . The shift in the nation state’s cultural policy corresponding to the rise of social media has become one of the major influences to the growth of Hallyu.

3 Possibilities of Contra Flows in Popular Culture

Korea has rapidly increased its exports of cultural products since the late 1990s. It started to export television dramas to a few Asian countries, followed by films and popular music, which propelled the dramatic growth of the Korean wave tradition in Asia. Starting in the mid-2000s, the Korean cultural industries have penetrated several parts of the world, including Western Europe , North America, and Latin America, while expanding the range of their cultural forms, such as online games, mobile games, and animation. While several Asian countries, including China and Japan, are still the largest cultural markets for Korean products, fans around the world have recently received Korean popular culture through both traditional media and social media. Consequently, between 1998—the very early stage of the Korean wave —and 2014, the exports of Korean cultural products, including broadcasting, movies, animation, music, games, characters, and manga , increased by as much as 22.75 times, from $188.9 million in 1998 to $4,299 million in 2014 (Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism 2016). In particular, Korean popular music has exponentially increased its global penetration in recent years. Between 2000 and 2008, the exports of music increased only 107%, but between 2008 and 2014, it was by as much as 20 times, from $16.4 million in 2008 to $335 million in 2014, which was remarkable, partially because of global fans who love K-pop via social media (Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism 2016). For example, once global fans started enjoying K-pop, they become avid audiences of music events held in many parts of the world, which boosted the rise of the exports of Korean popular music. Korea has eventually made a global sensation with several cultural forms, as many fans throughout the world love Korean popular culture.

Interestingly enough, the nature of cultural flows has changed partially because social media has become the new outlet of popular culture. As was briefly explained, global fans of popular culture previously enjoyed films, television programs, Webtoons (web comics in the U.S.), and music by either purchasing DVDs and CDs or watching them on traditional media, including television and on screen, yet now enjoy popular culture from other countries on social media with no material possession.

More specifically, the nascent growth of Hallyu has been made possible primarily because of global fans’ increasing access to K-pop and television dramas via social media. Korea’s reality shows, including Running Man and Super Star K, have been shared among overseas fans, young people in particular, on social media in the form of short video clips (Yoon and Jin 2016). K-pop has been popular in Asia, but fans in Latin America, North America, and Europe also enjoy K-pop, as social media such as YouTube has become a major outlet in the 2010s. K-pop has become one of the most dynamically distributed forms of pop culture in the global pop market, meaning K-pop has become widely circulated through new media platforms such as fan blogs, user-generated content platforms, peer-to-peer (P2P) file-sharing websites and social networking services (SNS) (Jung and Shim 2014). As the case of Psy’s globally popularized K-pop song, Gangnam Style, exemplifies, what is important is that social media has become an integral element of global cultural flows.

Major entertainment powerhouses have also made great use of social media. SM Entertainment, Korea’s largest entertainment agency, for example, opened its official YouTube page in 2009 to provide diverse music and visual content created by their own stars to their global fans. As of September 2013, about 3.6 million people subscribed to the page (Chung 2013). YG Entertainment, the second largest agency, also jumped on the social media bandwagon. Iconic K-pop star G-dragon opened an account on Weibo in 2013, a Chinese version of Twitter, with his followers exceeding 600,000 (Chung 2013). Hallyu had long conquered Asia, but before the proliferation of global social networks , attempts by K-pop stars to break into Western markets, including the U.S., had largely failed. However, social media has made it easier for K-pop idol groups to reach a wider audience in the West, and those fans are turning to the same social networking tools to proclaim their devotion. When several famous idol groups like 2NE1, Super Junior and Girls’ Generation hold concerts in Europe and the U. S., fans use social media to organize flash mobs demanding more shows (Choe and Russell 2012).

Social network sites have also become some of the most significant outlets for both mobile games and social images, as game developers and publishers have shifted their focus from online to mobile and social games. As Facebook itself has announced, more than 250 million people play games on Facebook.com and Facebook-connected mobile games every month (Facebook for Developers 2016). As such social media have changed the form of digital games and the so-called ‘social games’ on SNSs became a new trend in the global games industry in the 2010s.

Of course, instead of supplanting the old top-down (industrial expert-base) model, this new form of bottom-up (grassroots-base) model supplements the former (Hartley 2009a). In short, today’s cultural distribution is based on a mixture of bottom-up grassroots-led approaches and mainstream media-centered top-down approaches (Jenkins 2006, cited in Huat and Jung 2014). “Social networks are a valuable adaptive mechanism,” (Hartley 2009b , 64) and it is composed largely of social networks that are “hybridized mechanisms of macro-scale of populations and systems and micro-scale individual choices” (Hartley 2009a; Huat and Jung 2014, 417), causing new challenges and opportunities for cultural industries and policy makers. As will be discussed later, this new form of distribution has been the result of new cultural policies emphasizing the role of the government utilizing social media in the midst of neoliberal globalization .

4 New Cultural Policies in the Age of Social Media

A paradigm shift in cultural policy has been detected in the styles and contents of popular culture in Korea since the 1990s. Until the early 1990s, Korean popular songs were heavily censored by the government in the name of upholding morals and preventing political agitation under the military regime (Yang 2007). However, the loosening censorship under the newly elected civilian government starting in 1993 influenced the change in styles and lyrics. Right after the 1997 financial crisis, K-pop again rapidly changed. K-pop musicians in the late 1990s showed a much different direction for the Korean music industry.

Although the Korean wave started in the late 1990s, the Korean government’s role in supporting pop music was limited in the pre-social media era; however, as several forms of social media started to become available around 2004–2007, the Korean government began considering the increasing role of the social media, and thereafter, introducing relevant policy measures. Starting in the mid-2000s, as social media has acted as a new platform for global cultural dissemination, the governments and cultural industries corporations have been developing new policies and corporate strategies respectively to adjust to the changing media environment.

In particular, when the Lee Myung-bak government (2008–2013) developed cultural policy to support the cultural industries, it focused on the convergence of popular culture and digital technologies , and later social media. The Lee government applied neoliberal ideologies and practices in most areas, including its economic policy in general and the same approach was adopted for policies on the information and communication technology (ICT) sector and cultural industries . The government supported the cultural industries due to their significance to the national economy in the early twenty-first century, furthering the marketization of culture through its cultural policies (Jin 2016). As briefly explained in a previous section, the Lee government developed a clear policy measure to deal with rampant piracy in Asian countries.

Most of all, the Lee government supported the development of “smart contents” given the rapid growth of smartphones and social networking sites. It believed that timely investment was significant in order to help Korean cultural industries gain global competitiveness. As part of its plan, the government announced its project to select a few consortiums and to provide financial supports of up to $5 million when smart gadgets producers, service companies, and content producers work together to create smart content (Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism 2010). The government also secured $2 million to support application creators who develop mobile contents, and decided to support the game industry with $11.5 million in 2011 in order to nurture 100 game corporations (Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism 2010). The Contents Industry Promotion Committee (2011), which was established in 2011, decided to have contracts with a handful of global platforms to support the global service, localization, and marketing of Korean contents, as social media/digital technologies have continued to grow to be major outlets. The Lee government consistently supported and guided the Korean contents industries. In doing so, it expanded its state-intervention in the cultural industries not for the traditional goals such as the promotion of national identity and national cultural expressions but for economic imperatives.

The Lee government especially intensified its own capacity to meet the rapidly changing digital and/or social media-driven media environment. In its ‘Major Business Plan of 2012,’ for example, it expanded its strategic investment in the realm of new content areas that social networking sites are driving (Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism 2011). The plan itself was not yet matured; however, it at least showed that the government started to plan to develop its cultural policy relevant to social media.

Meanwhile, the Park Geun-hye government has continued to develop its hands-on policy for the Korean wave in that it acknowledges and supports the cultural industries . At the world economic forum annual meeting 2014, for example, she emphasized the significance of social media for the Korean wave:

Culture has the power to connect people of different languages and different backgrounds. The world is coming closer together as economic, social, cultural and other barriers are ebbing away. We see how the culture of one nation is no longer confined to that country alone. It is increasingly being shared and enjoyed beyond borders. We use the expression Korean Wave to describe the widespread enthusiasm for Korean culture. Today, that wave is spreading rapidly across the globe. When Korean music recently paired up with YouTube , it became a global sensation. K-POP , Korean dramas and films are being greeted here and there and creating new added value. When the cultural values of each country are brought together with IT technology , the possibilities for generating greater added value become truly limitless. (Park 2014)

What President Park understood was that Korea’s cultural industries corporations are welcomed around the world because they have successfully combined various cultural contents with new technology (Park 2014). Under this circumstance, the Park Geun-hye government planned to develop K-Platform, Global Webtoon Platform, and Global Game Platform to advance the Korean wave boom in the global markets. The Park government also developed a plan to establish a Korean wave map by analyzing the cultural industries via a big data model in order to provide designed information to cultural corporations (Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism 2015b).

As mobile and social games are increasingly significant in the global game markets, the Korean government and relevant agencies alongside game corporations have developed new supporting measures and strategies. The Korea Creative Content Agency has expanded its support to the game industry. One of the major policies in the game sector has been the establishment of the game global service platform (GSP), which focuses on the global promotion of game content by small-and medium-sized companies. As several global social networking sites, including Facebook, have functioned as a social game platform, “small game publishers and designers cannot compete with them in the global markets; therefore, one of the major strategies for KOCCA has been the installment of servers in the geographic locations in Britain, Germany, Russia, Singapore , Japan, and the U.S. that allow gamers in these regions to access Korean games” (Chung 2015, 500). In 2016 alone, KOCCA allocated $40 million dollars to support the game industry, including the expansion of the global service platforms (Lim 2016).

Overall, since 2008, Korea’s cultural industries , including the broadcasting and game sectors, have significantly changed their business strategies in the midst of the growth of social media. For example, online game corporations have changed their global strategies. Instead of establishing foreign subsidiaries, they have begun to install global platforms as Facebook and Twitter select. They locate the global service platform in Korea and provide game services to difference countries after changing languages.

5 Social Media Drives Changes to Cultural Policy in the Korean Wave Tradition

While there are several major cultural policies that drive the growth of the Korean wave, copyright-related issues have become some of the most significant mechanisms. Korea has continued to increase its exports of local popular culture with an expectation of gaining more financial benefits. But this has not happened due to the rampant piracy in several Asian countries. The nascent penetration of Korean popular culture in the global markets relies on accessibility, which means that global fans of the Korean wave access all kinds of social media to enjoy Korea popular culture. Unfortunately for the cultural industries corporations, this new media environment provokes unexpected negativities (Jin 2015).

In this respect, the Korean government has developed two different approaches which conflict with each other, but work anyhow. Most of all, it has created some policy measures to reduce piracy , which it believes hurts not only economic benefits but also cultural creativity. The government acknowledges that there are less dependable legal systems in several Asian countries, including China and Taiwan (Korea Creative Content Agency 2011), meaning that the revenue from the exploitation of copyright is not increasing despite the exponential growth of Korean cultural content online. Although it cannot be denied that the convergence of social media and K-pop has greatly developed the current boom of Korean popular music in many countries, piracy in Asia could damage the Korean cultural industries .

In fact, as social media has rapidly become part of people’s cultural activities, the circulation of unauthorized copies of cultural products has changed. For example, with the rapid growth of smartphone use, people have illegally circulated cultural products via smart phone apps in the 2010s (Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism 2015a).

In the Philippines alone, local television companies regularly buy licenses from Korean broadcasters for them to be able to air dubbed versions of Korea novelas. Local online game publishers also source most of their games from Korean game publishers. However, not all Korean creative content that is available in the local market is legitimate. Pirated copies of Korean dramas, music and games are also easily accessible to the public both offline and online. In general, “there is a very low level of IP consciousness and very low level of IP appreciation among Filipinos,” Mark Herrin of the IP Office of the Philippines told the forum. The Philippines is moving to amend its copyright law to address this nagging piracy problem. (Estavillo 2012)

As such, digital piracy in the age of social media is one of the most significant elements holding back further growth of the legitimate penetration of culture in the global cultural markets, in particular in the Asian region . As the Korea Creative Contents Agency (KOCCA)—the main government body overseeing the development of cultural industries —points out (2011, 3), one of the most significant policy measures to advance Hallyu further is the cooperation between the government and cultural corporations to protect intellectual property. The government, therefore, initiates intergovernmental collaboration among Asian countries to protect intellectual property (IP) rights, while the cultural industries develop new business models to overcome the IP issues (Jin 2015).

More specifically, the government has developed a very unusual approach to the copyright issue, assuming that for many other parts of Asia, illegal downloads and pirated CDs are so pervasive that only a small minority are willing to pay up for the legal versions (Associated Press 2012b). The government along with the music industry have decided to tolerate people creating music parodies instead of regulating them. For example, when Gangnam Style was globally popular in 2012, the Korea Music Copyright Association gave up pursuing legal battles with music parody creators but allowed them to make and post them online in the name of ‘fair use’ so that these music parody videos would help the popularity of Gangnam Style. Obviously, Gangnam Style’s success does not depend on strict enforcement of copyrights. Quite on the contrary, “to a large degree the success relies on effectively waiving copyright enforcement with regard to both the distribution of the original video and the production and dissemination of parodies and remixes” (Governance across Borders 2012).

As Gangnam Style runs toward one billion views on YouTube , the first Asian pop artist to capture a massive global audience has gotten richer click by click. With one song, PSY has become a millionaire from YouTube ads and iTunes downloads, underlining a shift in how money is being made in the music business. In fact, this one viral video has clicked more than 880 million YouTube views since its July of 2012 release. PSY’s official channel on YouTube, which curates his songs and videos of his concerts, has nearly 1.3 billion views as of December 2012. TubeMogul, a video ad buying platform, estimated that PSY and his agent YG Entertainment had raked in about $870,000 as their share of the revenue from ads that appear with YouTube videos (Associated Press 2012a). PSY and YG Entertainment also earn money from views of videos that parody his songs. Google as the owner of YouTube detects videos that use copyrighted content. Artists can have the video removed or allow it to stay online and share ad revenue with YouTube. In the final week of September when Gangnam Style had around 300 million views, more than 33,000 videos were identified by the content identification system as using Gangnam Style (Associated Press 2012b). With the global success of Gangnam Style, the heyday of K-pop , along with the country’s other creative content, is proving to be far from over. It provided a good reason for Korea to bolster its copyright protection strategy, particularly in countries where its cultural products exports are most popular and where copyright infringement is rampant (Estavillo 2012).

The Korean government has continued to develop several policy measures to protect the intellectual property of Korean popular culture in the global markets, in particular in Asia. The government and the Korea Copyright Commission have built copyright centers in several Asian countries, including China in 2006, Thailand in 2007, Philippines in 2011, and Vietnam in 2012, because these countries are major recipients for the Korean wave . The copyright centers protect copyright of domestic popular culture, while supporting the extension of legal trade of popular culture and digital technologies in these countries. They monitor digital and social media to find piracy and legally deal with relevant issues (Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism 2015a, b, 320). The Lee Myung-bak government especially intensified global copyright protection measures in several ways. In 2010, in order to better control illegal piracy in Asia, the government developed the illegal content obstruction program (ICOP) in several cultural sectors, including books and games, and intensified its monitoring of illegal circulation.Footnote 1 The government also established an intellection property portal site (http://www.ip-desk.or.kr/join/main.hcom) to provide necessary information of other countries’ IP related information to domestic cultural industries corporations (Ministry of Culture, Sports, and Tourism 2010). It has made tangible investments to protect domestic and foreign copyrights, which are very significant changes in cultural policy in the age of social media.

In sum, although the Korean government, in particular, recent conservative governments have been attempting to apply neoliberal cultural policies, emphasizing a small government in the realm of culture, they have developed an effective government body dealing with almost all cultural sectors as part of their economic and export strategies. Driven by a new systematic export strategy that incorporates private corporations in the cultural industries and the government, the cultural penetration of Korean culture, including K-pop and digital games, has increased in many parts of the world (Jin 2016). The deepening globalization of culture appears to impose several significant constraints on certain kinds of national level cultural policies. But the restricting of the nation-state is well characterized by a significant change in its functions and internal structures rather than some absolute reduction in its role or responsibility (Lee and Hewison 2010). The neoliberal reforms in the Korean context, in particular in tandem with the cultural industries , do not imply the end of government intervention. They do not mean that the Korean government has entirely followed the neoliberal path. As seen from its support for the cultural industries and their global strategies in the age of social media, Korea’s tradition of state-interventionism, which conflicts with neoliberalism , has continued at least in the field of cultural policy. That is, the Korean government cannot entirely give up its crucial role in boosting the cultural sector, which it believes is a new driving force for both the national economy and cultural diplomacy .

6 Conclusion and Discussion

This chapter has discussed the changing role of cultural policy at the nation-state level in line with the rise of social media as a significant means of global cultural trade and flow. In the early twenty-first century, several elements have become driving forces to advance the Korean wave boom in the global markets, and social media certainly plays a key role here. Unlike the early stage of Hallyu , which relied on TV broadcasting or sales of CD/DVD, the recent expansion of Hallyu has been driven by social media.

As social network sites and user-generated content sites have become new outlets for Korean popular culture, cultural policy for the Korean government has shifted in order to adjust to a newly changing media environment. The government has developed several policy measures to both facilitate the exports of several cultural forms, including films , K-pop , and Webtoons and protect copyright. It has also promoted the images of the nation-state through social media, which consequently help the Korean cultural industries increases their global penetration. In particular, the recent conservative administrations certainly understand the role of social media in the global markets and devised necessary supporting mechanisms, both financially and legally. While the Korean government has continued to support the growth of the Korean wave in several ways, cultural policy in terms of legal supports relevant to social media has become a crucial element in the 2010s.

Shifting cultural policy in the Korean context asks us to reconsider the role of state cultural policy in the age of social media. Some proponents of globalization argue that nation-states have lost their supremacy as a meaningful unit in the realm of culture as in other fields. However, the Korean case shows the nation-state is more than capable to continues to either initiate or support the cultural sector, both the cultural industries and cultural flows, and the necessity of strategic state-level cultural policy has been intensified with the growth of social media. As Wu and Chan (2007) point out, contemporary cultural flows are more complex than many globalists, who claim a decreasing role of the government, suggest.

Korean cultural policy makers have learned that the national cultural industries have substantially grown when the government actively supports the development of the cultural sector. While neoliberal norms call for a small government in the realm of culture, the Korean government has taken a fundamental role because the cultural industries need supportive governmental intervention to grow as commodities (Jin 2016).

Under the neoliberal cultural policies that several administrations have primarily taken on, the role of the Korean government has been decreased in several areas and/or occasions. What is unique in the Korean wave context is that the government has unexpectedly intensified its leading role in the growth of the cultural industries and the exports of popular culture and digital technologies . Korea has developed its state-led developmentalism since the early 1960s, and therefore, the Korean government cannot easily give up its trait (Heo 2015). The Korean wave illustrates that the government has reinforced its authority to cultural life. The Korean wave has become a global sensation in the middle of a coexistence of state-interventionism and neoliberalism over the past decade.

In particular, the recent governments have developed newly emerging areas of policy measures such as IP protection abroad and provision of global platforms for overseas consumers. This new direction has been made possible because the Korean government has emphasized the notion of ‘contents’ and/or ‘creative industries’ and thereafter, the ‘creative economy ’, in which intellectual property is taking a major role. Under this circumstance, many cultural corporations have also developed global platforms to disseminate their content abroad directly via these platforms. This means that instead of only selling their cultural products, they advance new forms of revenue resources as global fans are shifting their consumption habits.

Of course, it is not dicey to admit that the Korean government has supported the cultural industries primarily because of commercial imperatives. In the Korean wave context, both social media and the intellectual property rights in the cultural industries are some of the primary resources for capital accumulation; therefore, the Korean government should develop its supporting policy measures to gain further capital gains through global trade. In the early twenty-first century, neoliberal cultural policy still continues; however, it never eradicates the significance of the nation-state , and instead, it drives the increasing role of the nation-state in the realm of popular culture in the case of Korea.