Understanding Korean Webtoon Culture: Transmedia Storytelling, Digital Platforms, and Genres

Understanding Korean Webtoon Culture is one of the first monographs that focuses on webtoons, the new digital wave of Korean media culture. This book introduces the history, culture, and political economy of webtoons along with technological transformations of the media environment. Dal Yong Jin organizes the book with his attention on the convergence of digital culture—platform economy, mobile culture, and the IP engine—as the condition for both the advent and cultural content of webtoons. As unique inventions of Korea's major platforms—Naver, Daum, and Kakao—in the early twenty-first century, webtoons and their global popularity began in South Korea, one of the most wired nations in the world. Through the use of two approaches—political economy and cultural studies—Jin examines the phenomenon of this media genre that originated from South Korea and penetrated global markets.As to political economy, Jin points out the reverse flow of webtoons from a non-Western nation to Western nations as webtoons began in South Korea. Webtoons, in their origin, are local in their content and platform. Jin argues that webtoons are “not an appropriation or hybridization of Western culture” (10) and thereby indicate “a shift in the focus of cultural flows from hybridity to cultural identity” (158). Korean webtoons attract the global entertainment industry as a source of transmedia storytelling in “both the Global North (in countries such as the United States, France, and Japan) and the Global South (including China and Indonesia)” (3). In fact, webtoons entering global markets exemplify a new transnational model that reverses earlier cultural flows from the Global North to the Global South (8). Jin supports his assertion by pointing to new business models. For example, Kakao's acquisition of the Indonesian webtoon platform NeoBazar in 2017 was followed by relaunching KakaoPage Global in 2019 to expand services in Asia (64). Moreover, Naver planned to build the global headquarters in the United States to reach out to global markets especially for English-speaking readers (68). Jin assesses that a Korean media company based in non-Korean regions and expanding its cultural content to global markets shifts earlier power dynamics between the local and the global (68).As part of the analysis of political economy, chapters 5 and 6 include a discussion of the affective labor of fan translation and an interview with a well-known webtoon artist to comment on the importance of crediting creative labor as well as to weigh potential exploitation by the platform corporation. Jin also criticizes how media consumers’ time can be monetized by corporate strategies and the monopoly of the platform economy. Moreover, Jin's political economy approach includes a reconsideration of the flow between the West and non-West, arguably the Global North and the Global South. However, the advent of webtoons by major Korean platforms—Naver, Daum, Kakao—seem to be analyzed stagnantly in a top-down hierarchical model of cultural content. The hierarchy is conceptually structured as top-down, from the Global North to the Global South and from platform corporations to individual agents or fans, assuming the latter has less power. Using this hierarchical framework, Korean webtoons’ global expansion can only be considered as merely the dynamics of a new Global North. If the novelty of cultural and economic models derived from webtoons lies in the disruption of the preexisting global hierarchy, perhaps a new spectrum that is distinct from the earlier spectrum of hierarchy should be suggested as well. Looking at the Korean cultural industry as a mediator rather than a conquest could lead to further research and new perspectives.Chapters 3 and 4 take a cultural studies and critical media studies approach and provide textual analyses. Jin suggests two patterns of webtoon consumption by millennials and Generation Z—that is, “snack culture” and “binge-watching.” The two cultural behaviors are explained well as new patterns of consuming media in a quick fashion on mobile phones and media streaming platforms. However, there are more areas to explore. For example, as webtoons are a mix of images and texts, they involve both “binge-reading” and “binge-watching.” How does the coexistence of images and texts on the vertical screen of webtoons create a unique experience that is different from other digital media? The medium specificity of webtoons can be examined more in depth.Jin's definition of hybridization articulates well the intersection of political economy and cultural studies. Hybridization “not only aims for a mix of test, image, and sound to neutralize cultural products but is also related to cultural policy, the division of cultural labor, and the structure of power disparity” (135). Likewise, the book's account of webtoons as “a platform-ready form of digital content” reveals how the cultural content that is inherently optimized for a platform becomes a juncture of political economy, culture, and technology (51). This timely publication serves as an important guide for further research on webtoons, the convergence of digital culture, and global media to explore new cultural patterns of digital natives in the twenty-first century.