ABSTRACT
This study documents and analyzes the highly visible, fast growing, yet little studied phenomenon of Korean women’s transnational mobility and its relationship to the impact of media consumption in everyday life. Educational migration is a widespread and almost normal middle-class phenomenon, which is driven in part by valorized ideologies of English, the practical and symbolic value of the English language as a marketable commodity, and upward occupational mobility in the globalizing labor market. There has been a rising trend of Korean women leaving their country to experience life overseas as either tourists or students, eventually surpassing the number of men engaging in foreign travel. Why do women move? What are the actual conditions of their transnational lives? How do they make sense of their transnational lives through the experience of the digital media? This study draws attention to the ethnic media and digital technologies that facilitate people’s transnational, nomadic, back-and-forth movements, which create new and complex conditions for identity formation in digital diaspora. It argues that this plausibly powerful capacity of the media, deeply ingrained in what people take for granted, should be recognized in any attempt to understand the present phenomenon of transnational mobility in a digital age.
