|
|
|
|
CIAO DATE: 04/05/07
Online Storytellers: Blogging in South Korea
by Yong-Chan Kim and Kyun-Soo Kim
Korea began the twentieth century as one of the poorest countries in the world. The “land of morning calm”—as European tourists called this small East Asian country at the turn of the century—was governed under colonial rule by its neighbor Japan for the first three decades of the century. Immediately after gaining independence from Japan, Korea was stricken by the three-year-long Korean War. Divided and impoverished, the Korean Peninsula was in ruins. For about three decades, South Koreans suffered under the iron fist of authoritarian regimes. But the 1980s and 1990s, decades of rapid democratization, have given rise to a very different phenomenon: after enduring political, economic, and social adversity for the greater part of the century, South Korea has now emerged as one of the most dynamic democratic systems in the world as a result of its rapid economic development and dramatic democratization process. Once the land of morning calm, South Korea has now become the land of passion for true democracy.
The dynamic nature of South Korean democracy is most evident in the role of online civic storytellers—those who are both willing and capable to talk about civic issues online—in the restructuring of media and political environments. Based on the combination of rapid democratization and heavy investment in Internet Communications Technology (ICT) infrastructures during the 1990s, online storytelling among South Korean bloggers has functioned as a channel for sharing alternative political views. It is also an effective means for mobilizing like-minded people for political and civil action, including voting, conducting demonstrations, or engaging elected politicians in debate.
The purpose of this article is to discuss why online civic storytelling has been so influential in the Korean media and political environments. Rather than reverting to a technologically deterministic explanation (saying, for example, “the Internet offers technological capabilities to act in ways that were impossible with other old media”) or socially deterministic ones (solely based on such concepts as social capital or political efficacy), we argue that the combined effect of technological and socio-political factors can explain the unique experience of Korean online storytellers. We first demonstrate how Korean bloggers or “netizens” (a popular word in Korea to refer to active Internet users) have influenced the media and political environments. Then, we discuss three types of important online storytellers in Korea: citizen reporters (or shi-min-ki-ja); amateur columnists (or non-gaek); and active, online news-readers (or daet-kul) who regularly share their comments on articles in the mainstream news media. Lastly, we examine the socio-political, historical, and technological backgrounds that have contributed to building this unique, online civic environment in Korea.
Online Storytelling and Offline Political Actions. Since the late 1990s, Internet websites and blogs in Korea have become very effective in impacting policy, mobilizing people to collective action, and shaping public perception through the sharing and diffusing of civic and political stories. In several compelling cases bloggers have directly shaped and produced important political outcomes.
Blacklist campaign. In the general election in 2000, an alliance of about 500 civic groups in Korea published a “blacklist” of 164 politicians, who were described as “corrupt, lazy, and incompetent” and “unfit” to be in office. According to the National Election Commission, civic groups can legally develop and announce such blacklists of candidates. However, the law restricts the ways in which they distribute them: for example, it is illegal for civic groups to organize any kind of outdoor activities to distribute the lists, such as holding rallies and street marches, collecting signatures, or posting banners.1 So the civic groups had to rely on websites, bloggers, alternative online news sites, or discussion groups as their primary means of distributing the list. This blacklisting campaign appeared to be very successful; nearly 70 percent of the blacklisted candidates failed to get elected.
Yong-Chan Kim is an assistant professor at the Department of Telecommunication and Film in the College of Communication and Information Sciences, at the University of Alabama.
Kyun-Soo Kim is a doctoral candidate at the College of Communication and Information Sciences at the University of Alabama.