Reading economic magazines: hidden codes and financial crisis representation in Korea

Previous studies have suggested that media can strongly influence people’s behaviour towards specific events, making use of explicit statements but also hidden codes based mostly on traditional values.

This paper investigates how the dual characteristics of Yin-Yang, a main feature of traditional Korean and East Asian culture, are used to represent the Korean financial crisis through hidden codes on front covers of economic magazines. This was achieved by discussing the contents of 45 covers with four designers working for Korean economic magazines. Images were further investigated based on Barthesian semiotic analysis incorporating denotative, connotative, and mythical structures.

The result shows that representative colour and text codes correspond to key symbolic codes on front covers. The duality of Yin-Yang analysis therefore provides a specific angle on a semiotic system of explanation, and understanding semiotics requires attention to this additional set of representative codes in interpreting news features on the Korean peninsula. In this study, I have built up a representative analysis of crisis colours from the aspect of Korean cultural semiotics and reconstructed them as cultural codes which are found to Korean financial crisis by taking examples of economic front cover images, which contain a miniature of contemporary Korean everyday life.