Journal of Asian Pacific Communication - Volume 13, Issue 1, 2003

The study of communication has become one of most popular and major disciplines in Korea. There are over one hundred communication-related departments from eighty-eight colleges with more than 16,000 students today, doubled from the early 1990s. With strong support from the government, the media industry, and colleges, communication related departments have been able to build a reasonably good foundation in terms of programs and curriculums. Like any other disciplines, however, it is experiencing growing pains, searching a balance between the intellectually coherent curriculums and providing marketable knowledge and training for example. This essay discloses and examines the historical development and the current status of communication education in Korea.The study of communication has become one of most popular and major disciplines in Korea. There are over one hundred communication-related departments from eighty-eight colleges with more than 16,000 students today, doubled from the early 1990s. With strong support from the government, the media industry, and colleges, communication related departments have been able to build a reasonably good foundation in terms of programs and curriculums. Like any other disciplines, however, it is experiencing growing pains, searching a balance between the intellectually coherent curriculums and providing marketable knowledge and training for example. This essay discloses and examines the historical development and the current status of communication education in Korea.

This study examines how the effects of Cold War rhetoric, especially Korean War-era psychological warfare, manifest dramatically in media coverage of crises or conflicts involving the former adversaries of the Cold War in the Far East. After identifying major clusters of the Korean War-era rhetorical polemics from various psywar leaflets, this study demonstrates how the effects of political self-indoctrination have surfaced in the U.S. and Chinese media coverage of the 1991–94 North Korean nuclear weapons development crisis, the North Korean famine crisis of the mid-1990s, the South Korean financial crisis of 1997–98 and the U.S. bombing of the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade in 1999. The study contends that various “enemy images,” cultivated and reinforced through the process of self-indoctrination over an extended period, have provided a journalistic framing device which ultimately contributes to a non-dialogic media-based political discourse among the former adversaries of the Korean War.

By applying the Principle of Relative Constancy, this article extends prior research about consumer expenditures on mass media. To analyze four major mass media markets in Korea, including newspaper, movie, television, and VCR, this study employs two complementary methods: a regression analysis to test the Relative Constancy Hypothesis and market scale and elasticity analyses to measure the level of fluctuation of media markets during selected time periods.

This study compares public relations models reflected in the Web sites of Korea’s 100 largest companies and 100 randomly selected Fortune 500 companies. The literature suggests that Korean public relations practices and models are more craft oriented, while those of U.S. companies may be more professionally oriented. However, this study of Web site menu items (information, function, activity) found few differences, and many similarities, between public relations models reflected in the Web sites of both groups of companies. Korean Web sites were more interactive and used multimedia approaches far more often than American Web sites, suggesting that new technologies may be spurring development of professional public relations practices in Korea.

This study examined the South Korean public’s image of the multinational corporations (MNCs) Coca-Cola and Sony and their countries of origin (the U.S. and Japan) as well as the attitude toward and beliefs about the South Korean subsidiaries of these companies. The study also investigated the relationship between MNC and country images, on the one hand, and attitudes and beliefs about the subsidiaries, on the other.This study examined the South Korean public’s image of the multinational corporations (MNCs) Coca-Cola and Sony and their countries of origin (the U.S. and Japan) as well as the attitude toward and beliefs about the South Korean subsidiaries of these companies. The study also investigated the relationship between MNC and country images, on the one hand, and attitudes and beliefs about the subsidiaries, on the other.The study found that, in general, images of Coca-Cola and Sony as corporations as well as of the U.S. and Japan as countries of origin of these MNCs, among a convenience sample of residents of Seoul, were somewhat more positive than negative across various dimensions. However, their attitudes towards foreign subsidiaries of these MNCs — Coca-Cola, South Korea and Sony, South Korea — were somewhat negative. In addition, the MNCs’ corporate image and country of origin image significantly predicted attitude towards and beliefs about the South Korean subsidiaries of these MNCs. MNCs and their subsidiaries need to pay particular attention to their business and social conduct in terms of good citizenship and responsible behavior towards the community.

The Internet has dramatically changed the way organizations communicate with consumers. This study examines South Korean marketers’ perceptions of reciprocal communication forms (e.g., e-mail, comment, chat with webmaster, bulletin board, and survey) in terms of the extent of use, marketing cost reduction, usefulness, informativeness, credibility, barriers, and prediction of future use. A sample of Korean marketers found that the content of consumer feedback is more important than the Internet form in which it is delivered. Even marketers using at least one of the reciprocal communication forms wonder about the credibility of the information they receive and the lack of response. These phenomena might reflect that those forms have not yet reached the stage where they are seen as useful in replicating traditional communication with consumers. Managerial implications are discussed.

Research on body image has neglected a number of factors that seem likely to influence individuals’ eating disorders. This study looks at eating disorder relationships with age, cultural background, physical and psychological factors, amount and type of media exposure, and body image processing (i.e., comparing and endorsing thin ideals). Survey results from a sample of 376 Korean adolescent and college-aged females confirmed the mediating effect body image processing had on eating disorder indicators. Although striking age differences were found in the relationship between media use and eating disorders, there were also similarities between the two age groups. Comparing and endorsing thin ideals played a more important role among adolescent girls than among college-aged women. Contrary to previous research reported in the U.S., exposure to television “thin drama” was not a significant predictor of Korean females’ body image disturbance. Instead, exposure to foreign media had direct and indirect impacts on eating disorders among Korean females. Implications of the age and cross-cultural differences were discussed.