Struggling to stay relevant: The impact of the new media on asia’s cultural industries

East Asia1 over the last three decades has experienced a cultural renaissance rooted in the growth of its economies and booming urban consumerism, which is manifested in its massive circulation of contemporary popular culture and media-related commodities such as movies, pop music, animation, comics, television programs, and fashion magazines, as well as their derivative products such as games, food, toys, accessories, etc. The confluence of Chinese, Japanese, and Korean popular cultures, in particular, has intensified in recent decades reaching consumers of different national and linguistic boundaries, as well as inspiring a variety of transnational collaborations and co-productions involving creative personnel and companies from different parts of East Asia (Fung 2013; Lent and Fitzsimmons 2012; Otmazgin and Ben-Ari 2013). Some of these industries have formed alliances with international distributors and promoters and their products have sometimes circulated outside the East Asian region, particularly in Europe and North America (Jin and Otmazgin 2014, 47-48).