Korean Audience Reception Theory

Numerous of Korean cultural products (K-Pop), comprising of television dramas, movies and songs gained extremely fame from the East to the Southeast Asian region, the end of 1990s. Furthermore, the Asian economic crisis in 1990s led to influenced Asian buyers to exercise Korean cultural products. In Indonesia, Korean drama series gain a promising reception from countless generation of fans. This snowballing number of Korean dramas flourished on various television stations in Indonesia.This study constructed on reception theory’s framework, specifically portray audience as an active media text interpreter. This theory explains a broader conception of what audiences might act with texts, in order to allow for the ritual uses of communications

Within that perspective, the viewer came to be credited with an active role, at what people do with the media. Audience reception in media studies takes into account the individual members of the audience. It realizes there is a preferred meaning in the text, but also places emphasis on the audience in the process of constructing a meaning. Reception theory also suggests that the meaning constructed by the audience is affected by various other factors – including socio-economic frameworks and past experiences, and how the media message consumed by the audience. Through reception analysis, we can determine how the social, educational, and cultural backgrounds of the viewers shape their readings of the values and ideologies in Korean television dramas. This emphasis on the active viewers/audience as in tune with scholars such as Michel de Certeau and John Fiske. At the core of their work, the key insight that individuals negotiate and struggle against and oppose the cultural and media texts around them often taking materials and meanings from these products of the dominant culture and working them into their everyday lives in unpredictable and subversive

For instance, Shin and Juu Won portrayed as a stereotypical rich and powerful men. Then, Chae Gyoung represent a young woman from middle-class family and married to a crown prince in her young age. Dissimilar to Gil Ra Im. She presented as a working-class individual, from a middle-class family, yet prefered to work as a stuntwoman in order to earn living, and eventually married to Juu Won. This leads the researcher to concluded that each characteristics and personalities of the characters in the series are moulded by the demands of the narrative to represent the character types that feature in both Princess Hours and Secret