Discrepant Kisses: The Reception and Remediation of North Korean Children’s Performances Circulated on Social Media

Abstract

This article explores the burgeoning realm of videos uploaded on YouTube generated from content produced in North Korea otherwise known as the DPRK (Democratic People's Republic of Korea). Through state-sanctioned and individual channels, thousands of videos of North Korean music and dance have been uploaded, some resulting in over 57 million hits on YouTube. Taking a cue from this fascination, I employ digital ethnography to investigate the online reception and remediation of North Korean children's performances alongside their online comments on YouTube. I also draw from fieldwork conducted in North Korea in 2007. Theories that espouse the democratic participatory effects of social media platforms do not apply in North Korea where most of the uploaded material is produced and controlled by the state. Given this, I argue that North Korea's engagement with social media is marked by a profound disjuncture where the majority of videos portray ideological North Korean subjects in an online context where very few North Korean citizens are able to engage with this material as social media. I analyze how this disjuncture plays out as international users respond to and remediate these videos in various ways or by creating mash-ups that subvert their original ideological content. A young North Korean girl in a red, babydoll dress sings a song called "Kiss" (Ppo-ppo) [figure 1]. 1 Another girl, this time in white, extolls the virtues of the "King Potato" (Wang Kamja). Five North Korean boys and girls-noticeably dwarfed by their guitars-perform a song called "Our Kindergarten Teacher" (Yuch'iwŏn uri sŏnsaengnim) garnering over 57 million views on YouTube. 2 All three of these memorable children's performances have become subject to intense online reception and have generated various creative and discrepant remediations. In little over a decade, North Korea or the DPRK (Democratic People's Republic of Korea) has gradually asserted more of a presence on social media-uploading videos to YouTube and creating Twitter and Facebook accounts-affording unprecedented glimpses into many aspects of North Korean life. While a handful of YouTube channels featuring North Korean content started to emerge as early as 2006, North Korea's social media forays began to attract broader attention in 2010 when channels such as Uriminzokkiri ("With Our People") and StimmeKoreas ("Voice Koreas") launched, in some cases, in close conjunction with attendant accounts on Facebook and Twitter. 1 I have chosen to use the McCune-Reischauer system in romanizing the Korean language. However, I do make a few exceptions and have chosen to use more widely-known or previously published romanizations with the following: place names, author names, politician names, and YouTube user or channel names. 2 The video referenced here has been posted by multiple users but the one that has reached over 57 million views by the user named Viral Fill was titled "North Korean children playing guitars (Very Creepy)." Unfortunately, this link is no longer active. A similar exam...

“Such a Good Night”: Analyses of Korean-English code-switching and music video comments of ASTRO’S songs

“…For instance, the keywords for positive comments included talented, elegant, and heavenly, for example, and for the negative ones, commenters wrote words and phrases such as kinda cruel, look sleep deprived, and made to practice very hard. Thus, adapting the previously mentioned studies (Fernández-Martínez et al, 2014;Kwon, 2019;Siersdorfer et al, 2010), the clustering of each song's comments in a form of a table was divided into positive and negative sentiments, which was manually counted and depicted in numbers and percentages. Subsequently, all findings were discussed to relate them to the results from the previous steps, including the phonetics and phonology aspects by comparing the standard English with mispronunciations heard by the audience.…”

“…A study by Fernández-Martinez et al (2014), in which they studied audience perception towards car commercials, grouped comments according to whether they were about the audio, visual, or other features of the commercials. Another study by Kwon (2019) looked at comments by multilingual audiences on North Korean musical performances broadcast on YouTube. Viewers from a multitude of countries, including Russia, Germany, South and North Korea, Italy, Spain, France, Portugal, Japan, China, Vietnam, and Thailand, commented on various musical performances by North Korean children and the comments were classified as positive and negative.…”

“…This paper analyzed the English usage of "All Night", "Blue Flame", and "Knock" by ASTRO, a third-generation K-Pop group from a nonmainstream agency to examine code-switching and the global recognition of K-Pop songs. All songs were examined by using code-switching theories from Poplack (1980) and Bullock and Toribio (2009) and other theories on function analysis by Lawrence (2010) and Lee ( 2004) and comment analysis by Fernandez-Martinez et al (2014) and Kwon (2019). The findings revealed that the majority of code switches in "All Night" and "Blue Flame" were inter-sentential, yet "All Night" and "Knock" were more similar in utilizing English by having a new function (i.e., emphasizing a dialog from one's perspective), an important addition to Lee's ( 2004) functions.…”