Transnational Communities in the Smartphone Age (eBook)

The Korean Community in the Nation's Capital

Dae Young Kim (Autor)

eBook Download: EPUB

2017
258 Seiten
Lexington Books (Verlag)
978-1-4985-4176-3 (ISBN)

Infos

This book examines Korean immigrants’ transnational activities, in particular their consumption of transnational media, and the role of information and communication technologies (ICTs), especially the Internet and smartphones, on cross-border engagement and its impact on their sense of home, identity, and belonging.

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Transnational Communities in the Smartphone Age: The Korean Community in the Nation's Capital examines the durable ties immigrants maintain with the home country and focuses in particular on their transnational cultural activities. In light of changing technologies, especially information and communication technologies (ICTs), which enable a faster, easier, and greater social and cultural engagement with the home country, this book argues that middle-class immigrants, such as Korean immigrants in the Washington-Baltimore region, sustain more regular connections with the homeland through cultural, rather than economic or political, transnational activities. Though not as conspicuous and contentious as other forms of transnational participation, cultural transnational activities may prove to be more lasting and also serve as a backbone for maintaining longer-lasting connections and identities with the home country.

Autor

Dae Young Kim is associate professor of sociology at George Mason University.

Inhalt

Introduction: Transnational Ties and Their Impact on the Korean Community1. Demographic and Socioeconomic Characteristics of Korean Immigrants in the Washington-Baltimore Area2. Connecting with the Home Country: Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) and Transnational Media/Television3. Transnational Activities of Korean Immigrants4. Cultural Transnational Activities: The Consumption of Transnational MediaWith Young A. Jung, and Gyu Tag Lee5. Where is Home?: Identity and Belonging in the Digital Age6. Compatibility of Assimilation with Ethnic Preservation and TransnationalismConclusion: Overview and Implications

Rezensionen

Politicians can talk all they want about strengthening borders and building walls. The fact remains that in today’s world culture transcends political and geographic boundaries. In this groundbreaking study, Dae Young Kim documents how Korean migrants and their children remain connected to their ancestral homeland while thriving in a new country. He argues that the technologies that allow Koreans to simultaneously consume cultural products and participate in social life on both sides of the Pacific have blurred the distinction between the ‘old country’ and the new and are changing the meaning of citizenship.

This book provides vivid pictures of Korean immigrants’ transnational lives in the Washington-Baltimore area, the third largest Korean community in the U.S. While most important previously published books covering a particular Korean community in the U.S. focused on Korean immigrants’ small business activities and/or their business-related intergroup conflicts, this book focuses on their transnational cultural and social activities. It is a great contribution not only to Korean American studies, but also to studies of immigrant transnationalism in general.

Transnational Communities in the Smartphone Age steps outside traditional gateway cities such as New York and Los Angeles to focus on the understudied Baltimore-Washington metropolitan area, home to the third largest Korean American community in the U.S. Kim shows us how current immigrant communities synchronize their old and new countries as well as the limits of this bifocality and the troubling side of transnationalism.

Produkt-Details

• Erscheint lt. Verlag: 20.12.2017
• Reihe/Serie: Korean Communities across the World
• Co-Autor: Young A. Jung, Gyu Tag Lee
• Zusatzinfo: 15 Illustrations including: - 1 Maps; - 14 Graphs.
• Sprache: englisch
• Themenwelt: Sozialwissenschaften ► Ethnologie
• Themenwelt: Sozialwissenschaften ► Kommunikation / Medien ► Medienwissenschaft
• Themenwelt: Sozialwissenschaften ► Soziologie
• Schlagworte: communications • Cultural Studies • Immigration • Korean American Studies • Korean immigrants • Media Studies • Sociology • transnationalism • transnational media • Washington, DC
• ISBN-10: 1-4985-4176-3 / 1498541763
• ISBN-13: 978-1-4985-4176-3 / 9781498541763