Leaving North Korea: Illicit cultural globalization and mediated migration in the digital age

Abstract

North Korea is one of the least known, most closed, and repressive media cultural environments in the world. Despite the regime’s determination to retain its power by coercion and ban on the outside media, since the late 1990s illicit cultural globalization “from below” has become an integral part of everyday life of the subaltern population, operating through unofficial underground channels and making an unacknowledged sociocultural difference in the reclusive nation. Based on qualitative in-depth interviews with 60 North Koreans, this empirical study explores what their experiences suggest about the transformative and dis-embedding role of illicit media culture as a pull factor for the mediated migration in the digital age. Providing detailed empirical data, it importantly recognizes the often hidden and least studied phenomenon of North Koreans’ transnational mobility and its relationship to the impact of illicit media consumption in everyday life.