Mon prince charmant parle coréen : les fans de K-Pop en France et Lituanie (My Prince Charming Speaks Korean : K-Pop fans in France and Lithuania)

Abstract

For several years now, K-Pop has become increasingly popular in the world. One of the explanations of K-Pop's popularity is the Korean government's investment in popular cultural products as a part of 'soft power' strategy in the international political arena. However, I argued in this paper that this point of view is too narrow to understand the global K-Pop phenomena. To under¬stand these K-Pop phenomena in Europe, I conducted a field research in two difference countries, France and Lithuania. The interesting finding is, even though these two countries do not share similar history and culture, the process of becoming K-Pop fans was similar: they have been exposed to the Japanese popular culture in their early age and fascinated by East Asian culture, then to satisfy their ‘special’ tastes and desires they choose Internet rather than ‘classic communication tools’ such as TV and radio. There are two reasons for this choice: first, these classic media are not providing enough East Asian popular culture contents and second, they are not allowing horizontal communication among culture contents provider and fans. K-Pop phenomena reflects three important changes in 21th century’s globe: horizontal communication is prevailing, culture diffusion process is now inversed (bottom to up) and communicating, expressing individual desires and tastes on Internet amplify ‘contagion’ process and eventually produce a global phenomenon.