Graduation Year

2026

Date of Submission

12-2025

Document Type

Campus Only Senior Thesis

Degree Name

Bachelor of Arts

Department

Intercollegiate Media Studies

Reader 1

James Morrison

Reader 2

Andrea Acosta

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Terms of Use for work posted in Scholarship@Claremont.

Rights Information

© 2025 Esther Z Lee

Abstract

Emotional labor has been a key factor that drives the income for Korean and Western entertainment industries. Frameworks of affective labor and affective economics are used to examine how both industries transform intimacy into a structured economic resource. In the Korean idol system, everyday parasociality stems from the institutionalization of forms of affect such as fan platforms, messaging apps, photocards, and fan call systems that cultivate continuous emotional availability. Moments of micro-interactions turn into recurring revenue, demonstrating the form of overproduced affect. In contrast, Western celebrity culture operates through event-based intimacy where emotional access is limited, periodic, and strategically scheduled around high impact moments such as album releases, talk show appearances, controversies, and narrative “eras”.

Through case studies including HYBE’s Weverse platform and Taylor Swift’s strategic use of scarcity, tabloids exemplified by Britney Spears and the Sabrina Carpenter-Olivia Rodrigo media moment, and others, each entertainment system demonstrates how they leverage affect differently to shape fan behaviors and maximize profit. Whether routinized or rarefied, affective labor has become a central mechanism of the twenty first century media economy. Global entertainment industries have been directed dependency on emotional commodification, immaterial labor, and parasocial investments of fans.

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