• Journal of Popular Narrative
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• v.26 no.1
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• pp.41-76
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• 2020

Recently, the cinema industry faced a crisis on the rise of various media platforms such as Netflix, Amazon Prime, IPTV, and Kakao Page. The rate of film release in the theater has become ever shorter, and the secondary consumption of film through IPTV, tablet, PC, or mobile has seen a drastic increase. In the midst of this new media-geography, the most significant change in recent years would be the rise of the 'fantasy film' genre. This paper explores the conditions and characteristics of fantasy films in the way in which the genre has been constituted, and delves into particular aspects that its contents contain. This is an attempt to understand the sociology of the birth of a new genre. In this process, this paper will ask two frequently raised questions in regard to this genre. The first is to ask whether we can discern fantasy from reality, and the second is to examine whether the fantasy genre implicates certain social subversion. These two questions aim to discover how fantasy forms a relationship with reality and what this means. To do so, this paper will trace the genealogy of the fantasy film genre in Korea and analyze recent big hits such as the series as the model case of digital fantasy film. Through this exploration, this paper will be able to provide a new sociology of the fantasy film production and consumption in the 21^st century Korea.

• Korean journal of communication and information
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• v.33
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• pp.193-225
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• 2006

This study attempts to reconsider the significance of political economy as a theory of knowledge and/or a method for explaining the convergence of broadcast and telecommunications. It is going to suggest what the domains of political economy should be in the future by both highlighting the characteristics and blind spots of previous studies and drawing some distinctive features of a new media environment. The principals and recent research trends in political economy are reviewed in order to make clear that the historical totality as a meta-framework of political economy needs to be reexamined in the era of convergence. Although the scope of political economy has been limited to criticize the structure of media ownerships, the study emphasizes the importance of media consumer theory. It also discusses the problems of free market theory, distortion of active media audience theory, and limitations and creative tension of audience commodity. Finally, this study stresses the significance of audience-oriented policies in order to make approach to practical sides of media politics.

• Korean journal of communication and information
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• v.71
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• pp.157-193
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• 2015

The purpose of this study is to critically interpret generational trends in contemporary Korea through understanding the consumer experiences of luxury bag purchases of women in their late 20s and early 30s. Previous studies on luxury consumption tend to focus on an analysis of the value of luxury products as a sign and a symbol, the characteristics or class identity of luxury consumers, or expressive behavior in terms of ideal self-image. While including these factors, this study also expands the scope to a reflexive understanding of the social structural context behind the phenomenon of personal consumption. This was achieved by considering consumption in terms of the style and practice of everyday life, as well as its opportunities and limitations. In particular, we pay attention to how luxury bags are reproduced as media, which is a process that is circulated back to consumption, and through this process, this study reflects on capitalist life and subjects.

• Journal of Broadcast Engineering
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• v.12 no.5
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• pp.414-422
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• 2007

This paper aims to find the reasons for Korean television drama being popular in Asia. In particular, the author argues that the role of women's Korean drama fandom is important in the popularity of Korean television drama. What is the role of fandom? How is the gender identity related to women's television viewing? What is the communicative process between the Korean drama producers and fans? What problems does the Korean Wave face recently? These are the questions dealt with in the paper.

• Journal of Korean Philosophical Society
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• v.130
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• pp.337-361
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• 2014

The main purpose of this paper is to reconstruct the modern thought of love in terms of Dewey's esthetic experience. In the contemporary Korean society, discussions of love are represented in the two tendencies, scientification of love and idealization of love. In actuality, they support the insistence of impossibility of love by the modern sociologists. The former deals with love as chemical reactions in brain, which is based on physiology and biology. The latter regards hypothetical love through the media as the idea of love and displaces concrete love in reality with it. To see love as the subject catching, understanding, and desiring the object depends upon a narrow concept of experience. It comes from the idea that experience is not doing and suffering in a concrete situation but knowing and understanding the object. In this case, the uniqueness and the qualitativeness with each experience of love are ignored. When these traits of a romantic relationship are disregarded, love cannot help but subordinate to the logic of capitalism. This paper, therefore, attempts to find a new way to understand experience of love, focusing on Dewey's concept of aesthetic experience. I suggest that we can expect the possibility of experience of love if love is experienced in a similar way with aesthetic experience based on emotional interaction, and that the very experience of love leads to growth of our personality. Furthermore, I think this communicative experience makes people to change their community as well as each person's private life.

• Smart Media Journal
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• v.3 no.1
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• pp.46-51
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• 2014

The focus of design in the contemporary point of view has changed from the improvement in production efficiency for profitability and in styling for sales promotion to human-oriented design. Human-centered design has developed into design which includes social and ethical responsibility and values. With tradition and culture as a base the principles of markets and capital are incorporated as well. Such current design is the outcome of design which honors social values represented based on culture acquired from individuals and society and the the responsibility of the designer who provides it. For the realization of social values in design, it should be considered along with the influence of design on society, this study presented the following cases: First, human-oriented design for those who are isolated, but should not be ignored; Second, cultural-oriented design which makes a contribution to local conditions; and third, usability-oriented design which replaces familiar ideas with new paradigms. This study presented the function and meaning of design in terms of purpose and the methods to solve social and human problems using design. Further studies should deal with the realization and extension of social values through design.

• Korean journal of communication and information
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• v.41
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• pp.75-107
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• 2008

The paper aims to figure out the meaning of money in terms of communication in which we can find the specific communicative and cultural form of money. In the modern capitalist society, we cannot limit money within the economical terms - for example, store of value, medium of exchange, unit of account and means of payment - because money mediates all human activities beyond the economic boundary and conveys specific meaning in the social and the cultural area. Money can be the medium of the cultural and the communicational as well as the medium of the economic. In this respect, we've try to articulate money with linguistic or semiotic insight. Through this theoretical dialogue, we find two significations of money as a medium of communication. The first signification is meta-signification which drives the individual to the unlimited accumulation of the money. Meta-signification displace the second signification of the money that is the singular, over-determined and the mosaic significations. In this process money can be the signifier without signification. And then, money is the Master signifier which all sign should be identified imaginary. Finally, Money is not only the re-presense (Darstellung) of all sings but also the representative (Vertretung) of all signs. But this double position creates some tensions and makes master signifier of money unstable. Man's analysis of Bonapartism, which shares the linguistic or semiotic insight, shows the crack of the re-presence between the representative. Like Marx's analysis, the money has the tension between two signification which makes the room for the struggle to signify.

• Korean journal of communication and information
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• v.57
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• pp.33-48
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• 2012

Over the last decades, the issue of work or labor has played a critical role in prevailing discourses to represent the changed economic reality. Aesthetic labor, cultural work, network labor, team-work and alike, have played a dazzling role to represent the emerging economic order, employing the word of labor. Certainly, it is not less than a part of a wide range of shifts in order to make capital work with more effect by making up a workable and governable subject. In this article, I try to examine shifts around the media work which has contributed to expand the new discourse of 'labor.' I will say that it is quite crucial for accounting for the reality of media work to shed light on moves to represent media work, and, among others, one to transform the subjectivity involved in it among others. Furthermore, it would be necessary to take a close look at the subjectivity of media work and its modification to deal with and eliminate the precariousness of media work. Saying about media work without paying any attention to heterogenous and various practices to compose a media work, one is forced to regard media work as the matter of economic and legal interests. In addition, it would bring about that the cultural political concerns of media work will be detached from critical sight of the media cultural studies. Referring to major studies around media work in critical media studies, cultural studies and political economy of communication, this article will briefly look into the arrangement of contentions around subjectivity of media work in South Korea. And it will try to suggest what cultural-political strategy we need to investigate, fighting against the hegemonic power to generate and regulate media work and its workers in precarious conditions. It does not intend to search the media work and its complicated realities in detail in South Korea. I wish that it would make a preliminary step to propose and elaborate the critical analysis of media work and its form of subjectivities.

• Journal of Popular Narrative
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• v.26 no.1
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• pp.243-277
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• 2020

This paper examines a social and cultural history of horror films through the keyword "technology", focusing on The Spark of Fear: Technology, Society and the Horror Film (2015) written by Brian N. Duchaney. Science fiction film is closely connected with technology in film genres. On the other hand, horror films have been explained in terms of nature/supernatural. In this regard, The Spark of Fear, which accounts for horror film history as (re)actions to the development of technology, is remarkable. Early horror films which were produced under the influence of gothic novels reflected the fear of technology that had been caused by industrial capitalism. For example, in the film Frankenstein (1931), an angry crowd of people lynch the "monster", the creature of technology. This is the action which is aroused by the fear of technology. Furthermore, this mob behavior is suggestive of an uprising of people who have been alienated by industrial capitalism during the Great Depression. In science fiction horror films, which appeared in the post-war boom, the "other" that manifests as aliens is the entity that destroys the value of prosperity during post-war America. While this prosperity is closely related to the life of the middle class in accordance with the suburbanization, the people live conformist lives under the mantle of technologies such as the TV, refrigerator, etc. In the age of the Vietnam War, horror films demonize children, the counter-culture generation against a backdrop of the house that is the place of isolation and confinement. In this place, horror arises from the absolute absence of technology. While media such as videos, internet, and smartphones have reinforced interconnectedness with the outside world since the 1980s, it became another outside influence that we cannot control. "Found-footage" and "torture porn" which were rife in post-9/11 horror films show that the technologies of voyeurism/surveillance and exposure/exhibitionism are near to saturation. In this way, The Spark of Fear provides an opportune insight into the present day in which the expectation and fear of the progress of technology are increasingly becoming inseparable from our daily lives.

• Journal of Science of Art and Design
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• v.11
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• pp.221-249
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• 2007

Today, photography is facing to the crisis of identity and dilemma of ontology from the digital imaging process in the new technology form. It is very important points to say rethinking of the traditional photographic medium, that has changed the way we view the world and ourselves is perhaps an understatement and that photography has transformed our essential understanding of reality. Now, no longer are photographic images regarded as the true automatic recording, innocent evidence and the mirror to the reality. Rather, photography constructs the world for our entertainment, helping to create the comforting illusions by which we live. The recognition that photographs are not constructions and reflections of reality, is the basis for the actual presence within the contemporary photographic world. It is shock. This thesis's aim is to look for the problems of photographic identity and ontological crisis that is controlling and regulating digital photographic imagery, allowing the reproduction of the electronic simulations era. Photography loses its special aesthetic status and becomes no more true information and, exclusively evidence by traditional film and paper that appeared both as a technological accuracy and as a medium-specific aesthetic. The result, photography is facing two crises, one is the photographic ontology(the introduction of computerized digital images) and the other is photographic epistemology(having to do broader changes in ethics, knowledge and culture). Taken together, these crises apparently threaten us with the death of photography, with the 'end' of photography and the culture it sustains. The thesis's meaning is to look into the dilemma of photography's ontology and epistemology, especially, automatical index and digital codes from its origin, meaning, and identity as the technological medium. Thus, in particular, thesis focuses on the analog imagery presence, from the nature in the material world, and the digital imagery presence from the cultural situations in our society. And also thesis's aim is to examine the main issues of the history of photography has been concentrated on the ontological arguments since the discovery of photography in 1839. Photography has never been only one static technology form. Rather, its nearly two centuries of technological development have been marked by numerous, competing of technological innovation and self revolution from the dual aspects. This thesis examines recent account of photography by the analysis of the medium's concept, meaning, identity between film base image and digital base image from the aspects of photographic ontology and epistemology. Thus, the structure of thesis is fairy straightforward to examine what appear to be two opposing view of photographic conditions and ontological situations. Thesis' view contrasts that figure out the value of photography according to its fundamental characteristic as a medium. Also, it seeks a possible solution to the dilemma of photographic ontology through the medium's origin from the early years of the nineteenth century to the raising questions about the different meaning(analog/digital) of photography, now. Finally, this thesis emphasizes and concludes that the photographic ontological crisis reflects to the paradoxical dynamic structure, that unsolved the origins of the medium, itself. Moreover, even photography is not single identity of the photographic ontology, and also can not be understood as having a static identity or singular status from the dynamic field of technologies, practices, and images.