The Homophobic Call-Outs of COVID-19: Spurring and Spreading Angry Attention From Girregi Journalism Online to YouTube in South Korea

South Korea’s gay community received heightened public attention in May 2020 when a news agency reported that a COVID-19 patient had visited several gay clubs in the multicultural district Itaewon, Seoul. Following this announcement, a plethora of news content was published across various online media platforms. Through a case study of how the news on the Itaewon outbreak spread from online news to YouTube, we investigate the modalities of homophobic discourse and its circulation across different online media outlets. By examining the interplay between the Korean online news media (derogatorily called girregi journalism) and YouTube news channels in spreading the Itaewon story, we discuss how the nationwide homophobic call-outs against the gay community were instigated within an attention ecology. We argue that news media and YouTube news channels work together as affective mechanisms that define the dominant feeling rules about nonnormative subjects as a way of engaging with the pandemic crisis, through the accumulation of affect and attention toward gay bodies

CARE-LESS DATA POP CULTURES: AN INVESTIGATION OF THE DATA IMAGINARIES AND DATA CULTURES OF THE PANDEMIC

In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, many studies have critiqued the care-less legal and technical aspects of governments’ data disclosure of COVID-19 patients’ information. Yet, while there were many reported cases of public shaming of COVID-19 patients, not many studies have examined citizens’ usage and engagement with publicized data. In our study, we direct attention to citizens’ care-less engagement with COVID-19 patients’ data through the case study of the “Itaewon outbreak.” In May 2020, the gay community in South Korea became the target of public surveillance after it was revealed that a person who tested positive had visited a gay club in Seoul’s multicultural district Itaewon. Using the anonymized demographic and location data disclosed by the government, the news media sensationally reported on the data by highlighting the visitors’ presumed gay sexuality. In response, citizens widely circulated the data across social media by drawing on social media's popular culture of surveillance and call-outs. We describe these processes of interpreting and shaping pandemic data through social media’s participatory culture as data pop culture. To analyze data pop culture, we first examine the dominant data imaginaries cultivated through news media and government reports on pandemic data disclosure and how they inform the public’s understanding of data. Then, we examine how these dominant data imaginaries create power relations between people on social media as data owners and data objects. Lastly, we illustrate how these data imaginaries and relations become reproduced through social media popular culture and their implications

#StopAsianHate on TikTok: Asian/American Women’s Space-Making for Spearheading Counter-Narratives and Forming an Ad Hoc Asian Community

TikTok, one of the fastest growing entertainment platforms, is also a burgeoning space for hosting political expressions and movements. In this study, we examine how Asian/American women creatively occupy the #StopAsianHate hashtag on TikTok to counter anti-Asian racism and form pan-Asian solidarity. We analyze their participation in the #StopAsianHate hashtag as anti-racist space-making practices, which we define as the act of carving out discursive spaces to spread counter-narratives to anti-Asian racism and claiming space through their agentive, visual presence. Drawing upon Critical Technocultural Discourse Analysis (CTDA) as our method, we analyze 130 #StopAsianHate TikTok videos by Asian/American women and examine how their anti-racist space-making practices draw upon the features and cultures of TikTok. We illustrate how Asian/American women extend the discussion on anti-Asian racism to include their gendered and raced experiences, and challenge racism in affective and evocative ways. We conclude by discussing how their space-making practices foster an ad hoc community for Asian/Americans across differences amid rising anti-Asian hate crimes

Vlog Worthy Surveillance?: Investigating the Playful Surveillance Imaginaries of South Korea’s Quarantine Vlogs

Through a case study of South Korean citizens’ YouTube quarantine vlogs, this study examines the cultural narratives and practices surrounding pandemic surveillance, mainly the government-mandated quarantine monitored via the quarantine mobile app. Moving beyond the dichotomous understanding of surveillance as an act of control either to be resisted or accepted, we draw on the framework of playful surveillance and surveillance imaginaries and examine how Korean citizens creatively vlog their experience in quarantine. Through a critical visual analysis of forty quarantine YouTube vlogs, we illustrate how Korean citizens build playful surveillance imaginaries, which are imaginaries about surveillance constructed through playful frames that perceive participation in surveillance as agentive, pleasurable, and relational. Their playful surveillance imaginaries introduce novel ways of perceiving the self, surveillance technologies, and others in surveillance cultures and the relations that bring them together into a mutually beneficial and caring network. However, the subversive potential of this empowering and relational mode of surveillance may be limited by Korean society’s normative understanding of care