THE SOUTH KOREAN SOFT POWER AND ENTERTAINMENT ECONOMY: THE PHENOMENON OF WEBTOON ADAPTATIONS INTO K-DRAMAS

Abstract

By observing the “Korean Wave” and the role of culture in exerting (soft) power, it is possible to explore new media, which are often valued in aesthetic terms in Brazilian Comparative Literature research, but also need to be considered in their market aspects. Two of these new emerging media are webtoons (web cartoons) and K-dramas (South Korean audiovisual dramas), intrinsically related in mass circuits. In this context, this paper has the general objective of understanding how consumers of webtoons and their adaptations into k-dramas are affected by data colonialism and platform capitalism. To do so, we contextualize webtoons as an emerging and massive genre of digital literature, and we explore how the phenomena of “data colonialism” and “platform capitalism” in South Korea’s soft power policy are inseparable from the market for webtoons and their adaptations into South Korean dramas on reading and streaming platforms. Our discussion considers data from literature review and from webtoon and k-drama digital platforms; that material is analyzed through the theoretical framework of Flores (2021), Cho (2016), Cassino (2021), Silveira (2021), Silva (2020), Hutcheon (2011) and Park, Lee, and Lee 2019). As a conclusion, we can observe that the success of webtoons and their adaptations into k-dramas is strongly influenced by their digital platforms and the data shared between them, so that the circulation and commercialization of source texts and adapted texts mutually stimulate each other in that economy.