Page 52 - A Dissertation for Doctor of Philosophy

The Wide Generation Gap in Korea

Since Korea experienced a drastic socio-cultural change due to rapid industrialization and

modernization in a brief period, a cavernous generation gap exists. 103 The older generation is

sluggish or even recalcitrant in accepting the changes of values and customs. Conversely, the

young tend to accept the changes with ever-increasing alacrity. Through the development of a

cultural industry and interaction nurtured by new technology, the younger generation has more

freedom of sharing information such as fashion, behavior patterns, values, and worldviews.

Moon asserts that the Korean teens now are more related “with teens in Hong Kong, Japan, or

the United States than with their parents or grandparents who live on the same place with

them.” 104

The catholic trend in Korean society, however, “seems to be toward the direction of

postmodernism where the values of the individuals are emphasized.” 105 Moreover, since

contemporary Korean culture is becoming multi-faceted, it is becoming increasingly difficult to

describe culture with the familiar conventional paradigm. Yet, Eun-Yeong Na and Jae-Ho Cha,

Korean sociologists, discern the general trend of value changes in a comparative study of values

between the 1970s and the 1990s:

103 R. Inglehart Modernization and Postmodernization: Culture, Economic, and Political
Investigated 43 Industrialized Countries (Princeton, NJ.: Princeton University Press, 1997), 145-
46. He found Korean society to have the widest generation gap between 1920 and 1970.

104
Moon, “Korean Anthropology,” 130-31.

105
Na, Eun-Yeong and Jae-Ho Cha, “Changes in Values and the Generation Gap between
the 1970s and the 1990s in Korea.” Korea Journal 40 (Spring 2000), 322.