The study aimed to examine the meaning of the 21st century modern Korean culture through key words that lie at the center of postmodern times.
First, books in mass production and the modern educational system have created the 'intellectuals and the intellectuals have established their identity as a true intellectual while appearing to be opposed to the modern citizen class, specifically snobbish people, to which they belong. In the meantime, unlike the present in which it became possible to produce the knowledge of the public with the advent of digital media, knowledge producers during the modern period were still limited in number. A handful of knowledge producers have created elite art theory through the reinforcement of the dichotomy between pure art and pop art, and the establishment of art, which was temporary, against products in mass production.
The debates over the movie (D-War) might have clearly revealed the position of knowledge producers during the modern period.
The characteristic-free money and value-neutrality during the modern period has been widely uncovered in the form of the triangular relationship of love through love and money in pop culture. In the era of electric money, this began to shift to the motive of incest.
Also, the video materials, kino-novels, and radio literary works may exist as the bud of modern image culture. This is well-demonstrated from the visual-cultural perspective that viewed auditory image culture at the level of an image. Also, in the phenomenon that poem which is the product of recitation, was introduced into a book which is a medium of silent reading, the visuality of modern culture may be perceived. Given the experience-oriented tourism in the digital age, tourism as a tour of modern times may be one case of ocular-centrality of modern times.
Lastly, when looking into the discourse of new women which is an origin of recent debates over 'deonjangnyeo' (women full of vanity), new women of modern times are being placed in the process of otherness while their snobbish nature and femininity as a sexual object become combined.