The Korean Wave Before and After a More Digital Post-pandemic Era

Abstract

Part II begins with this first overview chapter. It has five sections. The first section is an introduction to the Korean Wave and how it has been classified by others as it changed over time. The second section includes our suggestion of a slightly different and more continuous classification of ‘regional Hallyu blending into a more global Korean Wave.’ This suggestion is based on the actual history of events, showing four stages. The data show that the Korean Wave was already becoming global, via its first synergies of global ‘simultaneous successes’ by 2018, and the Korean Wave increasingly took a digital world by storm after 2020 due to in-person entertainments being destroyed in many nations’ lockdowns between 2020 and 2023. The remaining sections compare and contrast content and strategies of the ongoing global Americanization that took a war-destroyed world after World War II, and compares it to Chinese ‘inverted’ and ‘negative’ digital power strategies and to the rising ‘positive’ global Korean Wave. Then, different ways that the entertainment industry is conceptualized are examined between the U.S., the U.K., and South Korea. Then, the many different ways people have conceptualized Korean ‘soft power’ is summarized, meaning, the power to move other nations’ hearts and minds to align with another country’s wider goals via others’ appreciation of its cultural forms.