Abstract
This chapter discusses the conceptual development, utopianism, and challenges surrounding media governance in South Korea. The main argument is that media governance is a utopian concept in the Korean context because it fails to acknowledge the local challenges that exist within the global mediascape. A Korean case study based on a political economic framework shows how the gray areas in media governance and the development driven by corporations both facilitate media governance being viewed as a utopian concept. The political economy is an adequate lens through which to view the interplays between the public and private sectors and to unpack the utopianism that is embedded in media and digital platforms’ governance frameworks. This chapter offers an integrated view of utopianism embedded in the unclear boundaries between the media, the Internet, and the platforms by focusing on the gray areas formed by the transitions among them. The chapter concludes by determining what is currently missing in Korean media governance based on the cases analyzed throughout the chapter.
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Jo, H., Jin, D.Y. (2022). Media Governance as a Utopian Concept in a Local Mediascape: Challenges for Conceptual Development in South Korea. In: Ganter, S.A., Badr, H. (eds) Media Governance. Global Transformations in Media and Communication Research - A Palgrave and IAMCR Series. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-05020-6_9
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