Review of Direction on the Connection between Seowon and Cultural Contents

Abstract

Seowon, the lecture hall, is one of the Korean traditional heritages globally recognized. To date, lots of efforts were made to align Seowon with people’s lives, for example, foundations of related organizations or institutions, preparation of legal groundwork, continuous developments of programs, and academic researches. As a next step, it is time for Seowon to seek the ways to be with citizens’ daily lives. To do so, first, it is necessary to review the directions from cases that Seowon and cultural contents met. Hence, the cases using Seowon and connection with contents were reviewed and the directions were offered how they were connected in this article. Among related regulations, ‘the Cultural Heritage Protection Act’ and ‘the Special Act on Conservation, Management and Utilization of World Heritage’ focused on conservation and management while they stipulated somewhat comprehensively and ambiguously on their utilization. On the other hand, utilization of Seowon culture and items of program development were offered in ‘the general guideline on the conservation and management of Seowon’ which is an order of the Cultural Heritage Administration, implicating the guideline to develop the programs on Seowon as well as potential limitations. The programs using Seowon mainly focused on the education whose ratio was increasing continuously. Whereas, rituals or traditional events were significantly decreased remaining few now. This might be the outcome to apply the education actively since the share of education was significant among the demands of people who visited Seowon. Unlike this direction, connections between Seowon and cultural contents focus on interests or attractions rather than education. Productions of web-dramas contributed to raise the awareness of Seowon by high number of hits, with VR productions. The contents in YouTube channel uploaded by general video producers rather than public institutions prepared the momentum to develop viewers’ friendliness on Seowon. Considering the direction to connect between Seowon and cultural contents, it is recommended not to focus on education and rituals too much which were its original roles. Comparing the researches between with participants of existing programs on Seowon and with general citizens, the former showed the preference to education and learning while the latter showed the preference to the programs to be able to approach without any burden like exploration. The difference can be explained that the former results showed the biased perceptions and intentions from general citizens since the research subjects were the active participants. Hence, it is recommended to review whether the existing programs on Seowon focusing on education have any certain biases and to consider the directions to expand the population to enjoy Seowon in the trials to connect Seowon with the contents. In this study, the existing programs and contents on Seowon were reviewed by the cases. However, it has the limitation only to review without offering objective alternatives. Therefore, further studies are required to review Seowon programs and contents more diversely, which will offer more systemic alternatives.