Korea

In this chapter we analyse the online commentary – often called electronic word-of-mouth (hereafter eWOM) – on a range of films made by a select group of female Korean filmmakers by thousands of Chinese fans who utilize the popular Douban social networking service (SNS) website. Douban commentators share and evaluate information and opinions about films accessed across cinemas, video on demand (VOD) platforms, DVD shops and illegal kiosks, as well as illicit peer file-sharing networks. To facilitate this unique cross-cultural analysis, this study employs innovative data-collection and analytical tools developed by the SMART Infrastructure Facility at the University of Wollongong. We aim to investigate how these Korean women filmmakers and their films are making transnational connections outside of Korea with a particular subset of the world’s largest audience of ‘digital natives’ – a label that describes mainstream Chinese movie fans in their twenties who spend a large proportion of their waking hours using online and mobile Internet and Web 2.0 applications.