The Future of Korea and the World

The previous chapter discussed mostly the many internal synergies that encouraged the external expansion of the Korean Wave. This chapter reverses it and discusses our changing external digital global context in the early twenty-first century that encouraged the peculiar internal successes of Korea and the Korean Wave, and continues to encourage it. This digital global context is described as a ‘triple global storm’ that faces all past nations now due to our changing media regime toward a global digital economy, a global digital culture, and a global decentralized media. This triple global storm seems to dissolve and to divide many past successful and unsuccessful nations into oblivion now unless they can adapt to this context well. Instead of only learning from Korea for general development in other words, we can learn from Korea about digital development—and particularly and how to get through this triple global storm and its digital ‘bottleneck’ intact instead of being destroyed. Korea shows both good choices and ‘good accidents’ (the latter meaning historical happenstance) that arguably helped the country get through this digital ‘bottleneck’ intact and even improved digitally so far, instead of destroyed by global digital changes that bring heightened global cultural transmission and heightened global economic competition. The hypothesis is that this triple global storm is selecting for a certain kind of three-factor national orientation in the future and making it difficult for other differently oriented nations, upon the same three factors. These three factors that have accidentally combined well in Korea are its ‘mid-size’ demographics, its ‘mid-size’ geographic territory, and its more homogeneous culture. This is a triple ‘good accident’ allowing Korea (and Korean-style oriented countries in general) to survive and even thrive competitively in such a fast paced global digital economy and culture, while other oriented nations are breaking up into these similar ‘K-National’ sized cultural pieces to compete. Evidence is shown that all nations of the world are being selected for or against globally by this ‘triple global storm’ toward these optimum kinds of political economy and culture that can survive in the long run in such a triple global storm brought on by this media regime changemedia regime change. This poses a serious problem of digital adaptation for other countries that are currently oriented very differently: the larger or smaller countries, demographically and geographically; and, the more heterogeneous cultures. At the start of the twenty-first century, many current nations may fail and break apart in this digital ‘bottleneck’ into component cultural pieces or become very different in a negative way as a digital police state if they do remain consolidated. Evidence is given for such claims based on several different trends of political economic changes worldwide in differently oriented countries, instead of only in Korea.