BCM320 – Contextual Essay

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If you’ve been following along with my recent blogs you will know I am undertaking an auto-ethnography approach to Korean Drama. I chose to focus on this genre because I had noticed the rise of Korean pop culture within my different social channels. These included Netflix, Spotify and my Youtube recommendations.

When choosing my field site it was easier than excepted due to increase on Netflix of Korean shows. I chose to specifically watch ‘Hello! My Twenties” (also known as Age of Youth) because it is is a drama-comedy revolving around the lives of five twenty-something women who must navigate their way through adulthood. And as a twenty-something woman who is trying to navigate my way through adulthood, I was instantly drawn to it. The show also has a 100% audience score on ‘Rotten Tomatoes“.

To collect my data from the field site I choose to…

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BCM320 Updated – Hello, my Twenties!

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To understand this, you may like to read my previous post here to be able to follow along better! In my previous post was narrated experience collecting data with the Korean drama series “Hello, My Twenties” to begin my autoethnography.  Ellis describes “autoethnography is an approach to research and writing that seeks to describe and systematically analyse (graphy) personal experience (auto) in order to understand cultural experience”.

For my data collection, I used live tweeting. It allowed me to document key epiphanies in my chosen field site of Netflix. Epiphanies are self-claimed phenomena (Ellis 2011) that help the viewer process the content.

As a method, autoethnography combines characteristics of autobiography and ethnography (Ellis 2011).  To understand my experience with Korean drama I am using the methodology of narrative autoethnography because “the power to seduce us into new ways of seeing the world”(Berger, 2001)

My cultural…

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BCM320 – Digital Artefact

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When I first enrolled in this subject I didn’t even see the name. I just knew it was a subject that would aid my graduation. My eyes have been opened wide to the fascinating gem of Asia, in particular, Digital Asia. When I first read about the research task my first thought was to deep dive into the world anime. Considering I wasn’t even sure if I was pronouncing it right it definitely ticked the required box of ensuring it was an aspect of Asia you weren’t familiar with. But after more consideration, I thought why not open my eyes to an aspect of Digital Asia that I am already quite familiar with within western culture. And that is reality TV/drama.

At first, I thought of finding a legal streaming to view Korean drama would be a big hurdle. Incorrect!  The most recent official annual figures count $239m worth of…

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My first anime experince – Akira (1998)

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This blog post will use autoethnography to produce a meaningful personal experience of the 1998 film Akira. This film deepens my capacity to empathize with a genre that is quite different to my world. Akira was my first interaction with anime.

When Chris first told me that it would be dubbed, I was relieved because I thought I would understand the movie. I was a participant observer in the world of anime. When viewing the film it was clear I stemmed from a different race. None the less I still had epiphanies while viewing the film. These moments helped me navigate myself through intense situations within the film and allowed me the reflect on these moments long after the scene ended. (Ellis, C., Adams, T.E., and Bochner, A.P. (2011)

It was clear from the beginning that I was a cultural stranger to the film. There was a clear theme of police brutality in…

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BCM320 – Godzilla Film

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To set the scene I openly admit I only just realized Gojira would be Japanese for Godzilla. This is the beginning of my knowledge surrounding the film. This film was also my first viewing of a black and white film, thus the special effects, though cutting edge for their time, had me having a bit of giggle.

For me, I have grown up in Australia. I was born and raised her. But I am the first generation of Australian within my family tree. My family is born and raised in Ireland, So this viewing of Godzilla was my first real interaction with any Japanese film, especially within this genre and honestly, it won’t be my last. The in-depth analysis learned through the live-tweets gave me insight into a film I would have never deep dived. After the Hiroshima & Nagasaki atomic bombs the Japanese government banned films about the incident…

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