KJCKorea
Journal Central

In this essay, I provide an account of how <Miss Trot> and <Mr. Trot> could become Koreans’ most favorite TV programs. I argue that it was possible through the deep feeling of connectedness and the sense of we-ness shared by Korean viewers of those programs which were generated by diachronic narrative intimacy and synchronic intimacy formed among Korean viewers. I argue that the power of trot as a musical genre and the online platform provided by those trot programs brought about such diachronic and synchronic intimacy. In this essay, I appeal to the concepts of ‘shared emotion’, ‘evocative object’, ‘narrative self’, ‘cultural artifact’, and ‘we-space’. I argue that trot as a musical genre has the power to form a collective narrative as a collective evocative object and that Korean viewers can have diachronic narrative intimacy and share cultural identity as Koreans by virtue of such power. Also, I argue that Korean viewers acquire the synchronic intimacy in the we-spaces created on the online platform which <Miss Trot> and <Mr. Trot> provide. Ultimately, I argue that Korean viewers could have the deep feeling of connectedness and the sense of we-ness sharing certain overarching emotion and that on this ground <Miss Trot> and <Mr. Trot> could become Koreans’ most favorite TV programs.

Trot, Shared Emotion, Evocative Object, Narrative Self, Distributed Cognition, Extended Mind