President Lee MyungBak, whom I'm sure has been quite emotionally devastated from all these protests and from the improbably quick fall of his support--it went all the way down to 7%. Remember it was at 22% few days ago and 50% few months ago?--gave the keynote speech at Future of the Internet, an OECD Ministerial meeting being held in Korea right now.
Here are some of the more notable excerpts from his speech: (via AFP)
Lee, grappling with IT-inspired mass protests over his decision to resume US beef imports, bemoaned the "spread of falsehoods" via the Internet in a speech to an OECD ministerial meeting on information technology.
"The Internet economy is expediting the development of a knowledge-based society, thus leading to new economic growth and job creation," he said.
Lee also called for the Internet to "be a space of trust. Otherwise, the force of the Internet could turn out to be venomous rather than beneficial."
He also noted that the system is still out of the reach of 80 percent of the world's people and pledged Korea's efforts to redress the situation. "The Internet gap is bound to lead to a socio-economic cleavage between individuals and nations, and the gap will be ever-widening."
Now, one particular phrase I paid attention to was "venomous rather than beneficial". A better translation of what he said is actually "poison rather than cure."
I believe that's his honest stance on the Internet that it's just powerful and could go either way. He's even created the Ministry of Knowledge Economy, so I'm sure he does believe in the power of the Internet for economy growth.
But, apparently he views the Internet more as poison and than cure at this moment. Well, at least for himself. Just few hours before he gave the speech, the CEO of Afreeca.com was arrested. Remember Afreeca? That was the citizen broadcasting station for many Korean people. You might go "What? President Lee let the CEO of Afreeca arrested to kill the freedom of speech? I thought South Korea was a well-established democratic country!"
Well, to be fair, let me explain more. Moon Yong Sik is the CEO of Nowcom, which runs a Web-disk service as well was Afreeca. Moon was actually arrested with copyright violation charges because of the Web-disk service. A Web-disk service is basically an unlimited file-uploading and file-sharing service where you can basically upload/download anything you want, like P2P, including movies, mp3s, porn clips, documents, ripped software CD images, etc. Obviously, there's been a long battle between the copyright holders and those companies. Nowcom isn't an exception; indeed, its services drew some of the most fierce debates regarding copyright issues in Korea.
So what happened to Moon is quite legit. Can't argue with that. But here's the problem.
Why now?
I do believe there's a good chance that this was a pure coincidence. But, come on! And here's even more serious problem.
People are asking "why now?"
President Lee might have just offered another tool for people to use against him with. Again, it might have been coincidental, but ain'g gonna do any good to restore his reputation.
Protests are still going on with less fervor than before. The only thing left for President Lee might be "pick your poison" soon. The Internet is powerful and could go either way. So, please make it work good for you. And what Lee's doing isn't necessarily the right way to do it.
Before I go on to talk
about the portal-centric Internet landscape in Korea as I said in the last article, I decided to
write a post on a different topic because the portal topic seems to cover too many areas, so I'll probably need some more time to think through. But
before that, I'll give you guys something juicy again. Namely, "How to
be a broadcasting jockey".
That's what all these livecasting citizen journalists are called. By Afreeca,
they are officially named BJs. They are also called Street Journalists. The question is how do you
live-broadcast while out in the public?
The key lies in Internet ubiquity. People live-upload video content through WiBro. And the setup looks like this:
You connect to the Internet through your WiBro modem like I did
hundreds of times in the past; you capture the scene live with your
webcam or better-quality camcorders connected to your notebook. You run
some Afreeca applications on your notebook. That's it. You have
your own real-time broadcasting station!!
Remember this is only one example of what Internet ubiquity can do for your
country. Now, imagine what could happen when you have this many people
out in the street holding candles; hundreds of them are BJs.
But in this country, one of the most wired and technology savvy in
the world, the month-long series of gatherings has also been a valuable
testing ground for the latest communication devices, gadgets and
websites.
From high-resolution camera phones to instant broadcasting software
and water cannon-resistant camcorders, the latest advances in
communications were in evidence during the five weeks since the
protests began.
Many demonstrators rely on Internet forums to get information on
rallying points, weather forecasts and riot police presence. With
powerful camera phones, they are able to shoot photos and videos that
they can instantly upload on Internet sites thanks to high-speed
wireless technology.
It wasn't even a year ago when I had the Joost-on-highway experiment.
Did I imagine what's happening right now could happen in less than 10
months? Heck, no! So there's goes my lack of imagination. OTL.
There's a reason why this blog is taglined Spicy Thoughts on Digital Generation in Asia. :)
(Sorry about the long absence. I've been MIA for some personal reasons and I'm finally getting back to my old self. But for real, I'm back and got lots of stuff ready for you. Let's ride along!)
Say, for a little over a month, Korea has witnessed something that the entire humanity has never seen before; that is, digital democracy in its purest form. It starts with the Web and it ends with changing people's lives. Citizen journalism is the channel through which it's happening.
The impact of the "new media" on journalism and politics is something that's been discussed for years and years. We got amazing opinion leaders in Jay Rosen and Jeff Jarvis. Many talk about how Obama's grassroots ethos positively affected his victory. Sure, social networks and arousing young people to become more actively involved are the right way to go. But trust me, we have never seen anything like this before.
The story is very long and complicated, so I'm going to try to stay as brief as possible. President Lee Myung-Bak, who was elected with nearly 50% of the vote last December and who began his presidency in February, is currently getting under 25% support only. Here's the political background of what's happening, taken from Wikipedia:
Two months after his inauguration, Lee's approval ratings stood at 28%.[25] Concerns over a possible threat to public health from US beef imports in South Korea in relation to the U.S.-Korea Free Trade Agreement
caused popular opposition to the Lee administration to grow. The
government's original agreement with the U.S. had limited beef imports
to meat produced from cattle under three years of age because younger
cattle are thought to be at lower risk of contracting mad cow disease (BSE). This limitation was similar to the agreement between Japan
and the U.S.; shortly after Lee's visit to the U.S., the agreement was
altered to remove limitations on cattle age. Many Koreans considered
this a betrayal, and there was talk of attempting to impeach
Lee. Lee later said that a deal had been reached that may allow Korea
to ban U.S. beef if it is found to pose a threat to public health...
How did it happen so quickly? This is the fun part. Lee is a very conservative guy, who still believes in "control". What he did was, when numerous protests broke out around the country, he basically ordered the media companies "not to report" to the people about what's happening. There were police at work, trying to stop the "peace candlelight" protests, or vigils now called; some police went quite violent, but none to be reported by major broadcasters, newspapers, Internet news sites, or magazines.
But we're living in the age of Web 2.0. Now people are in control. People that were there became citizen journalists - thousands and thousands. And the force of citizen journalism has grown so immense that basically nobody can stop it now.
The first site was an online discussion forum called "Agora", run by Daum, one of the largest portals in Korea. Citizens got mad at President Lee that they started an online signing of impeachment movement on Agora; within the next few days the number of votes/signs reached 1.5 million--CAN YOU BELIEVE THAT! Some of the articles written by citizens at the protest sites drew millions of views and thousands of comments, like EVERYDAY.
Bloggers were second to none in this, obviuosly. Some blogger protesters were detained at police stations. However, even from there, they kept reporting on their blogs using their cellphones. Obviously, there were new star bloggers born.
But more than anything, here's where I think Korea is awesome! People are gadget-gods. We have ubiquitous connections everywhere in Seoul. What do citizens do? They live-videocast the protests using their devices on Wibro. Afreeca, which used to be barely top 5 video services in Korea, let its users livecast from the protest sites. Basically, it got really popular and became No.1 video site in Korea just in days. Why? Because other services were scared of the political pressure from the gov't, while Afreeca wasn't. So more people flocked together at Afreeca and Afreeca has been living happily ever after.
(This video was actually recorded by a newspaper reporter; however, what you are seeing here is not reported anywhere on "mainstream" media. It was broadcast on the Net and drew lots of viewers, reaching millions.)
As of June 6, some 34,000 viewers have contributed over 130 million won ($130,000) for the live Web casting. For many Korean expats working or studying abroad but who still wish to follow the drama in Seoul, OhmyTV was the only source available to them. They were the most frequent financial contributors of all, paying a disproportionate amount of money.
In summary, the lessons taken from the whole situation:
You just simply can't stop citizens from being reporters when they're motivated and equipped with technology;
No matter how much control or pressure are exerted on mass media, "new media" is the new king;
All these principles used in blog marketing, such as transparency, authenticity, and truth, are for real; if you look sketchy, you're gonna get caught. Millions are watching you.
Now, there's still one focal point on which the "I-want-to-control" guys can put pressure on the new media: portals. Many funny things happening with portals and how the new media is operated. More on this in the next post!
p.s. just a little disclaimer: I'm not quite a political person. I agree with President Lee on some of his policies and stuff. He and I also have the same religious affliation. However, when it comes to the way he deals with media, and esp. people, I just have blunt objections against his philosophy and actions. Just to clarify :)
Yup, I'll be at your service. While I've been digesting lots and lots of information on what's going on and my brain is right now explode with so many thoughts. And I know these are GOOD ones.
One problem I'm struggling with right now is I don't know where to begin. So can YOU GUYS maybe come and pop the soda can?
Some candidates are: ("here" here means "in Korea")
Yes, you heard it right. I'm in Tokyo to attend Web 2.0 Expo Tokyo. This will be my fourth conference this year: Web 2.0 Expo in SF in April, Supernova in SF in June, State of Play V in Singapore in August, and this one; but this is my first trip to Japan.
I'm in Tokyo with the openmaru team. Here goes my discloser: I've been working with openmaru, a Korean Web 2.0 service provider, for its English blog marketing. Indeed, its English blog has been run by me! (but I'm not an employee, just working on a partnership-based project)
I'm not sure if you guys have come across the blog or any of its services, but not because I'm the marketer, but even from a pure user point of view, you should most definitely try out the openmaru applications, such as Springnote. It simply rocks!
I'll be reporting from the Expo as well as interviewing famous dudes and companies in the Web 2.0-sphere. One thing interesting is that reporting will be done through 4 major channels: openmaru Korean blog, openmaru English blog, Taewoo's log (my Korean blog), and TechnoKimchi. Chances are I'll be posting a lot more stuff in Korean than in English.
But if you ever had questions regarding openmaru or me, or the Web and digital landscape in Korea, feel free to come around the openmaru booth to find me. I'm not there, other openmaru members will be more than kind enough to find me for you :)
I'm very excited to attend the conference for many reasons. But for TechnoKimchi, I think this will definitely mark an important milestone as this is the first time I'm officially exploring the Web in Asia, outside Korea. As I've been writing in my Korean blog, there are so many things that are just completely different about the Web and the digital culture in Japan from Korea that I'm almost lost. Too many thoughts in my head.
But for now, I'm resting for tomorrow. Hopefully, I'll be able to run into some of you guys!
I realized that I've been getting a huge traffic to this blog since the CNN broadcast. I've also been learning that this blog is not in its most user-friendly format: if you're a first-timer to this blog, chances are you'll probably get lost, not knowing where to begin.
So, I've decided to become my own editor for the day. I picked out some articles which I thought might be most interseting to you.
Luckily, I haven't written too many posts on this blog yet, making it not too difficult to pick out the articles.
So, here is the list. You probably want to read them in the order listed below. Have fun!
And, oh yeah. If you want to contact me, please don't hesitate to email me at
CNN is featuring a whole series called "Eye on South Korea". You'll purely love it! It's basically everything I've been trying to say at TechnoKimchi: what's it's like to have a digital generation like in Korea.
You can watch the video clip of my interview HERE.
At first, I thought it was really incredible that a little boy like me could be featured on such prestigious media like CNN. And it was possible because of this blog: THEY FOUND ME THROUGH TECHNOKIMCHI!
It's just so weird. Tons of people have been contacting me since the broadcast. Lots of people actually searched for the term "technokimchi" to land at this blog. What a day!
Below are some pictures taken from the set. I'll go over more on CNN: Eye on South Korea in the coming days! Until then, hurrah!
Hello, everyone. It's been a long long time since I basically "stopped" posting here. Which is pretty sad :( It's just been crazy last couple of weeks, but with so many things coming up in the next weeks, I just had to switch my mode to the "blogging" mode again. And here I am :)
After reading my first article, many have contacted and asked me to give even more snapshots of what the digital generation looks like here.
Well, well, well. None other than our dear Chang-Won Kim, a close friend of mine, the blogger behind Web 2.0 Asia, a CEO of the largest blogging tool provider in Korea (the article was written before he became of the CEO of the company), and also an old Samsung buddy of mine, wrote up a really really nice article on the exactly same topic, only better than my own version :)
So, here are some notable lines from his article. Don't just try to chew on it. Swallow it and digest it. Take a deep breath and imagine what a life like this could do for education, business, culture, and even technology. What he describes in the article is very very typical of a Korean boy in my opinion.
So here we go!
...But these days, Insoo and his friends don't simply
use their phones to send an SMS, or to take pictures or listen to MP3
music. Whenever funny things happen during the day, Insoo and friends
shoot video with their phones and send the clip to portal sites, hoping
their clips will be featured on the portals' homepages.
...The first thing Insoo does after Hakwon is, of course, turn on the
PC. Insoo has a difficult math problem as homework. He posts it up on
Naver Knowledge iN, a popular online Q&A service with some 70
million entries.
Within about 10 minutes of posting, someone chimes in with a good
answer, and Insoo awards him with some "Knowledge Power" points --
knowledge-based economy in action among 14-year-olds.
...Gone are the days when kids bought CDs by their favorite singers.
For the young generation, music is deemed something that must be
consumed over the 'Net -- CDs are for their parents. To date, Cyworld's
minihompy streaming music sales amount to more than 200 million songs,
or $100 million in revenue.
I wasn't able to write too much after the first session. So, rather I'm going to try to put down the summaries of the last 3 sessions I had today.
Regulating Virtual Worlds
Legal experts explore how controversies related to intellectual property, real-money transfer, gaming as political speech, time-limit addiction laws and the policing of Internet cafes play out throughout the region. They will also draw our attention to culturally variable assumptions that underpin analytical approaches to these issues.
Much of the panel discussion revolved around whether it's better to have communities self-regulate or have external forces to step in. At large, there are three forces at play: 1) community of players regulating themselves, 2) game and virtual world makers deciding what needs to happen within through creating systems certain way, 3) actual regulating bodies like the government. Many factors come into play here. Obviously, it'll be the best if all the players and communities act reasonable enough to reach certain social agreements and norms to control themselves; however, not quite so in reality. That's what makes things complicated. Besides, creating laws and regulations for a world that doesn't really exist is a very difficult task itself. For example, let's say there is a crime in Second Life. What country's law should be applied to that member? Is it for Linden Lab to decide? Or should the U.S. government intervene? What if the player was Korean?
Education, Kids, and Teens in Virtual Worlds
There has been an explosion of interest in the use of virtual worlds in education. This panel will examine what works and what doesn’t work, and will present some ideas for the effective use of online spaces for student learning. It will also ask examine how children and teens interact within virtual worlds, and what this teaches us about building kid-and-teen-friendly environments for learning and playing.
This session was very interesting because I've always known there's so much learning, in a non-traditional sense, that could be done through an environment like virtual worlds. People indeed train themselves and learn a great deal in this kind of environment. They set goals for themselves, leadership becomes visible, and they collaborate with each other to solve certain problems. Some of the examples in the session were astonishing--like teaching classes in StarWars Galaxy. Now how much of this could be applied to the real world education?
Currently the real world education system is designed for a world back in 1950's. Kids are growing up enormously influenced by the digital technology. They are a lot more participatory also. The social and economic scenes are changing faster than ever due to the Internet. Unfortunately, none of this is reflected in the current one-way-teaching and text-based education system. For us to be able to adopt the opportunities given by virtual worlds and other technologies, we need a completely new mindset.
However, not everything can be learned in virtual worlds, obviously. It's our job to figure what virtual worlds can offer in this space. It seems at the moment that virtual worlds are good providing an environment in which people can come together to collaborate to solve certain problems, rather than learning specific skill sets.
Connecting East and West
Experts explore variations in playing styles, the influence of game mechanics on cross-cultural cooperation, the challenge of intercultural communication, and outcomes of forced localization. This panel will also explore issues of society, governance and virtual worlds as a vehicle for people-to-people diplomacy.
Well, as you know, that's the goal of this blog. I want to let known to the world what's here in Korea and Asia and see if we can make any connections between East and West. I was actually one of the panelists during this session. But, I wasn't invited as an "official" panelist, but rather as a translator to Judge Unggi Yoon, who is a very well-respected member here. He'd explain what the MMORPGs are like in Korea and I'll translate that into English for the audience. But, hey, I was still up on the stage. What an honor! ;)
The session covered various topics ranging from the two different purposes of playing games in Lineage and Second Life, gold-farming, index for measuring the east/west-ness and etc. I really enjoyed the session while listening on the side most of the time. We definitely need to take a more analytical approach to crossing the gap. While there are fundamental differences between the two which will never get any closer than they are right now, there are also a growing number of commonalities among the two that something could be done for further development. The most important point of the session, I guess, was acknkowledging the value of the differences and how the differences indeed enrich our virtual world experiences.
- - -
Just like every time I attend a conference, I really enjoyed meeting new people and having conversations with them. It's simply because you get to learn so much by doing so. For me, this is a completely new experience: the first time being in Singapore and first time being immersed in the virtual worlds talk.
I'm very excited for tomorrow and hopefully I'll be able to bring even more interesting stuff to you all.
These virtual worlds are crucial building blocks of global civil society. As such, they harbor the promise for relationship-building and cooperation across national borders. Solutions to the cross-cultural growing pains of this new medium require a sincere commitment to transnational dialogue.
As I briefly mentioned before, in order to appropriately cover the digital generation in Asia, the gaming culture and industry, now expanded to virtual worlds altogether, must be extensively studied. Unfortunately, my expertise has been more on Web 2.0 and Enterprise IT industry in general, not so much games and virtual worlds.
But they're all coming together. I get to interact with lots of kids of age 5-15 or so at church and they live in a different world than the one I grew up in. (I'm only 28 by the way). They don't seem to draw the line between the "real" world and the "virtual" world. The two worlds are so interchangable in their lives. What's imaginary and what's physical? They don't care and they don't know, but it's all in their minds. I get to talk to people working at NCSoft and Nexon, two largest game companies in Korea, and Cyworld. AND I HEAR SOME CRAZY STORIES FROM THEM.
IBM is training their employees in Second Life. When I attended Supernova in June, there was this great session on virtual worlds and I remember Raph Koster, one of the gurus in the field, saying "many of the Web 2.0 principles and phenomenon have come from games." I totally agree with him, especially as far as how social interactions are concerned.
I go to PC bangs and see middle/high school guys in their school uniforms spend 4 hours straight playing Starcraft, Lineage, WoW, FIFA, etc. after school. What's scary is how this is such a big part of their lives. I mean their real lives.
What would happen when you combine everything together? I mean combining different virtual worlds with blogs, mobile, social networks, and messengers. Maybe some efforts towards standardization would help? What if you can play WoW on the bus for an hour using Wibro on the way to school? What if your Cyworld buddy can be found on Club Penguin? Possibilities are endless, I think.
Of course, we'll be seeing various social and legal issues come up in this fast-developing medium as well. I know much about what's up with social networks and blogs. Can the same principles be applied to virtual worlds? What's the same? What's different?
We'll find out at the conference. I'm not sure if I'll be able to live-blog the conference, given I don't know much about the wireless connections at the site. But I'll be constantly feeding you guys with what I learn there. And trust me, what I'll be learning there will be extremely important to anyone who has anything to do with anything digital--Web 2.0/portal services, H/W & gadget makers, game makers, social networks makers, book publishers, network providers, teachers, legislators, parents, kids, or even HR people.
Should I go, "stay tuned and excited" again? ;) Well, I am!
As the TechnoKimchi blogger, I tend to hunt for things that give you even the slightest hint at something from the Asian Web reflected in the West Web. And today, I caught a big fish. It was on none other than ESPN!
I've explained before that I'm a crazy fan of NBA, so obviously NBA on ESPN is one of my daily destinations. Today I went back and saw this little thingy called "OTL".
I was like "What? Can't believe this!" because, as you know, ESPN is so..well, American. For your information, "OTL" (also widely known as "orz") is an Asian emoticon for expressing frustration or despair. If you closely look at it, it looks like a frustrated man on his knees. O is the head, T is the body and the arms, and L is the legs. The same with orz. A little Chinese video clip on variations of orz:
Anyhow, the article link was about this NBA ref who has been changing the games he officiated because of his association with big time gambling. So the use of OTL there looked perfectly justified because he has been the biggest and the saddest news around NBA for a while (until Kevin Garnett went to the Celtics to join Paul Pierce and Ray Allen).
Anyhow, I was so excited. I saw it as an Asian culture invasion. If you see it on ESPN, that's it. End of story. It was indeed a big fish for me. Yay!
Except for that my ectasy only lasted for few more minutes. I found this:
And this is how I literaly reacted upon my own discovery:
Anyhow, this is my own OTL story of the day. But seriously, when it comes to emoticons in Asia, there's also so much to talk about. In Asia, we live in a different metaphysical world that emoticons come out differently as well. More on it later.
