By Jason Lim
Kim Jong-hyun of K-pop boy band SHINee committed suicide a few days ago. While other Korean celebrities have committed suicide in the past _ most notably actress Choi Jin-sil in 2008 _ Kim's untimely death garnered domestic and international coverage.
In a macabre way, the blanket coverage of Kim's death this week testified to the undeniable popularity of K-pop across the world, even more so than the positive media treatment of BTS's breakout American Music Award performance a few weeks ago.
Unfortunately, some mainstream media got their K-pop stars mixed up. NBC Chicago was forced to apologize because they used a B-roll of a BTS appearance on the "Ellen DeGeneres Show" in reporting the death of Kim, especially focusing on RM, the blonde-haired, English-speaking leader of the band.
Needless to say, they don't look anything alike, except for their light-blondish hair. This is what the NBC Chicago anchor said, "So yesterday we told you about the death of a popular South Korean boy band singer. Kim Jong-hyun apparently died of a suicide. We mistakenly reported that the band recently appeared on the Ellen Show. That was a different band, BTS. I apologize for that."
It's funny how you can be so known but still be invisible and not recognized. Perhaps this should have been expected. After all, all Asians look alike. Of course, I am being facetious when I say this, yet I am also addressing the well-known concept of cross-race effect.
Writing in "Psychology Public Policy and Law," Siegfried L. Sporer explains the cross-race effect: "Studies of recognition of faces of an ethnic group different from one's own reveal a robust recognition deficit for faces of the respective out-group and tendency to respond less cautiously with respect to out-group faces."
In other words, to a certain extent, all Asians really do look alike to non-Asians. To the NBC staff, perhaps RM really did look like Kim.
But the mistake by NBC also speaks to our tendency to classify and organize our perceptions and knowledge of the world into neat, stackable buckets. Kim's suicide became such big international news not because he (or SHINee) was a household name, but because he was one of the better-known ambassadors of K-pop.
While I am sure that Kim had a huge fandom as an individual artist, his death was news because he represented K-pop. The news was all about a K-pop star having committed suicide, not Kim Jong-hyun the individual who committed suicide. In that sense, one pretty boy K-pop singer is just as good as another. The main focus of the story doesn't change.
For example, I don't think this mistake would have happened with Psy. He became famous individually as a one-hit wonder, not really as a prototypical K-pop artist. In that sense, Kim became a victim of the taxonomy of how the U.S. mainstream classifies and understands K-pop.
Which leaves me curious how other Asian countries where K-pop is popular covered this story? How did the Vietnamese or Indonesian media frame the story? Was it about the tragic, untimely death of Kim Jong-hyun the individual? Or the suicide of a famous K-pop star who was also popular in their respective countries?
If Korean media's reporting of the suicide death of Hong Kong movie star Leslie Cheung is any indication, I suspect the former. I still remember the outpouring of grief and disbelief over Cheung's suicide many years back. Korean fans didn't consider him as someone who represented the Hong Kong movie scene.
While he was an essential ambassador of the whole movie genre, he was also an individual artist who was regarded as one by his non-Chinese fans and grieved over as such. Perhaps that's what's happening in other parts of Asia where K-pop is popular.
Creating a taxonomy and generalizing appearance and characteristics based on someone's membership into the particular taxonomy isn't new or specific to the U.S. media. It happens everywhere and is practiced by everyone. In fact, we can't live without it since it's a primary organizing principle for how we live.
Look around and notice how we create in-groups (to which we belong) and out-groups (the other) when navigating the world. We look down on someone's behavior and say, "he gets that from his family." We find something wrong with someone's appearance and blame their bad taste on their socioeconomic background.
Such mental taxonomy leads naturally to racism (by definition) since we are associating certain appearance and generalizing characteristics to a group of people that we classified according to our own convenience and standards.
What's especially interesting _ and illustrated by the NBC Chicago mistake _ is that we literally don't see individuals as well when we mentally classify them as belonging to a certain out-group that we don't belong to personally.
Our mental taxonomy affects how we perceive others. For one moment, extend this mental-perception relationship to everything else. Imagine how many other people and things we don't "see" and misunderstand because they are the "other."
Jason Lim (jasonlim@msn.com) is a Washington, D.C.-based expert on innovation, leadership and organizational culture. He has been writing for The Korea Times since 2006.
Kim Jong-hyun of K-pop boy band SHINee committed suicide a few days ago. While other Korean celebrities have committed suicide in the past _ most notably actress Choi Jin-sil in 2008 _ Kim's untimely death garnered domestic and international coverage.
In a macabre way, the blanket coverage of Kim's death this week testified to the undeniable popularity of K-pop across the world, even more so than the positive media treatment of BTS's breakout American Music Award performance a few weeks ago.
Unfortunately, some mainstream media got their K-pop stars mixed up. NBC Chicago was forced to apologize because they used a B-roll of a BTS appearance on the "Ellen DeGeneres Show" in reporting the death of Kim, especially focusing on RM, the blonde-haired, English-speaking leader of the band.
Needless to say, they don't look anything alike, except for their light-blondish hair. This is what the NBC Chicago anchor said, "So yesterday we told you about the death of a popular South Korean boy band singer. Kim Jong-hyun apparently died of a suicide. We mistakenly reported that the band recently appeared on the Ellen Show. That was a different band, BTS. I apologize for that."
It's funny how you can be so known but still be invisible and not recognized. Perhaps this should have been expected. After all, all Asians look alike. Of course, I am being facetious when I say this, yet I am also addressing the well-known concept of cross-race effect.
Writing in "Psychology Public Policy and Law," Siegfried L. Sporer explains the cross-race effect: "Studies of recognition of faces of an ethnic group different from one's own reveal a robust recognition deficit for faces of the respective out-group and tendency to respond less cautiously with respect to out-group faces."
In other words, to a certain extent, all Asians really do look alike to non-Asians. To the NBC staff, perhaps RM really did look like Kim.
But the mistake by NBC also speaks to our tendency to classify and organize our perceptions and knowledge of the world into neat, stackable buckets. Kim's suicide became such big international news not because he (or SHINee) was a household name, but because he was one of the better-known ambassadors of K-pop.
While I am sure that Kim had a huge fandom as an individual artist, his death was news because he represented K-pop. The news was all about a K-pop star having committed suicide, not Kim Jong-hyun the individual who committed suicide. In that sense, one pretty boy K-pop singer is just as good as another. The main focus of the story doesn't change.
For example, I don't think this mistake would have happened with Psy. He became famous individually as a one-hit wonder, not really as a prototypical K-pop artist. In that sense, Kim became a victim of the taxonomy of how the U.S. mainstream classifies and understands K-pop.
Which leaves me curious how other Asian countries where K-pop is popular covered this story? How did the Vietnamese or Indonesian media frame the story? Was it about the tragic, untimely death of Kim Jong-hyun the individual? Or the suicide of a famous K-pop star who was also popular in their respective countries?
If Korean media's reporting of the suicide death of Hong Kong movie star Leslie Cheung is any indication, I suspect the former. I still remember the outpouring of grief and disbelief over Cheung's suicide many years back. Korean fans didn't consider him as someone who represented the Hong Kong movie scene.
While he was an essential ambassador of the whole movie genre, he was also an individual artist who was regarded as one by his non-Chinese fans and grieved over as such. Perhaps that's what's happening in other parts of Asia where K-pop is popular.
Creating a taxonomy and generalizing appearance and characteristics based on someone's membership into the particular taxonomy isn't new or specific to the U.S. media. It happens everywhere and is practiced by everyone. In fact, we can't live without it since it's a primary organizing principle for how we live.
Look around and notice how we create in-groups (to which we belong) and out-groups (the other) when navigating the world. We look down on someone's behavior and say, "he gets that from his family." We find something wrong with someone's appearance and blame their bad taste on their socioeconomic background.
Such mental taxonomy leads naturally to racism (by definition) since we are associating certain appearance and generalizing characteristics to a group of people that we classified according to our own convenience and standards.
What's especially interesting _ and illustrated by the NBC Chicago mistake _ is that we literally don't see individuals as well when we mentally classify them as belonging to a certain out-group that we don't belong to personally.
Our mental taxonomy affects how we perceive others. For one moment, extend this mental-perception relationship to everything else. Imagine how many other people and things we don't "see" and misunderstand because they are the "other."
Jason Lim (jasonlim@msn.com) is a Washington, D.C.-based expert on innovation, leadership and organizational culture. He has been writing for The Korea Times since 2006.
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