On Critically Examining the Roles and Signifying Features of a Landmark Human Documentary Text by EBS
Abstract
In South Korea, most of the young adults nowadays would encounter extreme socio-economic uncertainties, hardships, and fierce competitions among them. At the same time, a number of them tend to express deep frustration, anger, restlessness, and disillusionment toward the society in general. This alarming society-wide phenomenon has also been dealt with in the realm of local public television sector. Especially, in recent years, those production crews in Korea Educational Broadcasting System (EBS) have started to present several human documentary texts in which they would illuminate the varied lives of youth in agony. With that in mind, this study focuses on a four-part documentary text,”Sidae Tamkoo, Cheng-Nyeon” through a detailed textual analysis. We especially look into the various documentary modes and representational strategies in this text as a way of keenly evaluating the diverse roles of, and limits in such documentary-making efforts in the pursuit of representing and contextualizing ‘youth-at-risk’ in contemporary South Korea.
Journal: Korean Journal of Communication & Information, Vol. 92: 73-127. (2018)
Authors: Dongwook Song , Heo Huh, Seungyeon Ki, Sujin Kim, Juyeong Shin, Jinyoung Kyong Ah Hwang and Kee hyeung Lee
DOI: 10.46407/kjci.2018.12.92.73
Download: LINK (Written in Korean)
Into the text
“One of the key characteristics of this text is that it captures diverse images of young adults, ranging from those who have entered the labor market without attending university to those who have graduated from prestigious universities. It emphasizes the aspect that the majority of the youth in Korean society share the ‘crisis of becoming ordinary’ and the internal turmoil and struggle resulting from it.” p.90
“The series on ‘Sidae Tamkoo, Cheng-Nyeon’ tends to focus on representing situations of damage, resignation, and social isolation that young workers experience. However, it concludes by reproducing the inertia of human documentary genre without significantly changing them, in that it fails to intricately highlight the systemic problems and ‘absence of responsibility’ and other complex elements that would have created their current situation, and emotions such as anger, despair, or turmoil that would have existed before their resignation.” p.110
Dongwook Song 