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")
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.
When I saw that, something clicked. So I went back to the page and checked out the interview materials at the end of the document, only to realize that this is the project for which I was interviewed with. Last month, Manpreet Singh SARAN, from Singapore, working on a communications class project, emailed me, asking me about the Web 2.0 environment in Korea. I was able to answer the questions, which, in turn, were used to create the page. How awesome! I'm just glad that I was able to help.
Here's a link to the PDF version of my email interview. Just in case, I'm copying and pasting the whole text to this post as well. (I made changes to and polished up some of my comments down there because they were either gramaticaly wrong or I missed/misspelled some words, etc.)
Thanks, Lawrence and Manpreet!
1) A decision to require Web readers to use their real identities when posting articles online on Internet news sites is sparking concerns over privacy and free speech. What is your view on this?
While there’s been a great number of occasions where anonymity caused lots of real world problems in Korea, I don’t think the real identity regulation will be the cure for all. There will be lots of new problems springing from this kind of approach: freedom of speech will be threatened in many ways as there’ll be lots of people unable to honestly expressing their opinions. Privacy is obviously even a bigger concern. Making your real name up there won’t naturally create more responsible comments online. It’ll reduce both good and bad behaviors online. I’d say rather urging and educating many Internet users and companies to create an environment where people will be more responsible will eventually pay out.
2) What are some of the restrictions that the Korean online community is facing which prevents for further development in social media?
Practical applications, like flickr of del.icio.us, aren’t really taking off in Korea. Most of the popular applications except search are about making sites people-friendly. It’s social nature of the Web users in Korea, which I believe need some change.
3) What impact does citizen journalism have on the social media arena in Korea? How are sites like News 2.0 driving change?
Unfortunately, News 2.0 isn’t actually doing particularly well in Korea. OhMyNews has also lost its brightest shining moments as well. Online media has been completely concentrated around portals, like Naver and Daum, where both mainstream media and citizen-based media (often called UCC-User Created Content) are both very strong.
We actually have seen incidents like Dog Poop Girl so many times that many people are almost numb to such things happening. People carry around digital cameras and camcorders all the time that you basically have eyes and ears everywhere. People sometimes try to act more responsibly out in public since they know the horrifying and tremendous consequences of things spreading so quickly online. Often people take for granted how (private) things can be discovered so easily. It’s happening at a greater scale and there isn’t much that can stop it from happening, I think.
5) How are Korean businesses using Web 2,0 to their advantages? Please highlight an example. For example, how are businesses leveraging on Naver?
The best case is obviously Naver Knowledge-iN, which has used user participation to answer other users' questions. This mechanism eventually made Naver the Wikipedia + Google of Korea. We have seen a very high level of participation among the Web users in Korea across many areas. However, Internet companies, especially portals, have been accused of not being particularly keen at opening up their services to the masses.
6) Why is the Korea online community so advanced in terms of using social networking sites(e.g. CyWorld) and Web 2.0 applications? Does Korean Culture or Government play a part in this?
It’s mainly two things: a great broadband connection (this is the govenment part) and a culture where everyone just loves flocking together. Unlike MySpace, Cyworld is much about “decorating” your own space with lots of fancy stuff, like avatars and virtual items. That’s played a great deal in the development of services like Cyworld.
7) How different is the Korean online community different from other communities in terms of internet behavior with regard to social networking sites?
The active Web participants in Korea in general are much younger in contrast to other countries, especially the Western ones. So we see a Web that is a lot more social and entertainment-oriented than heavy and more serious one in the West. Lots of bloggers in Korea only write about travelling, food, photography, relationships, or games while many in U.S., for example, would write about business, tech, and media.
8) At the moment, what are new exciting Web 2.0 developments taking place in the Korean Online Community?
There’s been a good number of venture startups putting efforts into developing the new “web 2.0” services in Korea. As mentioned above, the Web in Korea has been greatly concentrated around portals. While there has not been too many great success stories among those startups yet, many portals are slowly moving in the direction of finally distributing more traffic to outside of the portals. I see it as a great sign of the Korean Web moving in the right direction. The Web was never meant to be so concentrated.
9) What are the signs that the lines between mainstream media and social media are blurring?
Daum, one of the major portals in Korea, has started a service named “Blogger News”, where it’s a combination of Digg and OhMyNews. It’s trying to find the right balance between a completely user-based quality news and professional journalism. Many of the content sites, including blogs, video sites, and picture sites, are also displaying and leading traffic to both mainstream content and user generated content. What we often see is the social media content generated off one big mainstream news article.
So, by now, many of you guys probably have heard of the Taliban capturing 23 Korean Christian civilian aid workers in Afghanistan. There's already been 2 victims shot to death. One of them was a minister. There still remain 21 hostages, with nobody knowing how the crisis is going to end. I'm Korean and a devout Christian, so I have many things to say about the situation, but that's not the main point of this post. You can find more information on the situation here and here.
While I've been trying to follow what's going on in Afghanistan, my interests in media have made me notice few things.
The first is that when there's only little source of information out there, "Web 2.0 media" doesn't matter as much. The Taliban spokesperson keeps calling only the real big traditional media corps, like AP, Reuters, AFP, CBS, NHK (Japan), and KBS (Korea). The thing is that the Taliban are so good at spreading different stories through different routes that it takes a long time to gather all the information together. We're not seeing any of the citizen journalism activities with this incident at all, like we did with the Asian Tsunami, London Bombing, and Katrina. All the facts and news reported are being wired through traditional media companies.
Here's what's literally happening:
Millions of Korean people are watching major Korean TV channels for breaking news night and day;
Stories are first captured by global-scale media entities as the Taliban keep giving stories to those large companies. This is probably due to three reasons: first, they're likely to deal with the "big guns" to make sure stories travel fast; second, they're likely to deal with media companies whose main language is English. After all, I doubt any of the Taliban members actually speak Korean; last, they're likely to deal with those with big pockets as it's been known that each time they approach with a news story, they give the stories to those media companies in exchange for some six-digit dollar money. (Just think about it. How sad is it to watch the Taliban sell news about the captured who don't know when they're going to be shot in the head.)
Korean media companies, unable to get the stories firsthand, are keeping their eyes and ears on what the global media companies are saying. Pretty much all of the breaking news on Korean channels is being reported in this manner: "according to AP, ...", "according to Reuters, ..."
Often, some of the stories propagated through different media channels don't match with one another. Korean TV channels get really confused as they face different stories about the same thing happening. Mostly, they just go "we'll see as things settle down."
No room for citizen reporters. Of course, the situation demands way too much even for the best news companies in the world. But, it's just very difficult for someone like me to sit and wait only to hear "AP said...", "AFP said.." Can't we please have more eyes and ears?
However, even with the limitations on how citizen journalism could do in terms of reporting, we're definitely seeing a huge surge of citizens participating in journalistic activities. No, it ain't blogosphere. No, it ain't Twitter, Facebook, or Cyworld. It's in the comment section of the news stories on portal sites.
The picture above is a screenshot of the comment section to a breaking news story posted on Naver, the largest portal in Korea. You can see there are already 155 comments to the news only an hour after the story was posted at 1am. If you look through the comments (all in Korean), you can see some real high-level discussions going on. It talks about the Korean government, what's wrong with the current Korean Christian churches, whether to take military actions, and harsh criticism of what U.S. is (not) doing with the situation. You can also see some comments added to each comment.
Commenter journalism, if you will, is an extremely strong force in Korea. It's so powerful that every time there's a major issue, all the mainstream media--TV, newspapers, magazines, etc.-- do not hestitate to report from these comments and say "this is what we Korean people think." It's so powerful that many of the malicious comments left on celebrities' blogs or Cyworld pages are considered one of the primary causes of some celebrity suicides. It's so powerful that all the Korean people are required to register their national IDs on those portal sites so that the government can track you down when your comment becomes influential and bad enough to cause any kind of trouble.
There's a lot more to talk about the power of comments in Korea. Strong commenting culture might be one of the reasons why blogs never took off as THE main discussion medium in Korea. But for today, I'll just leave you with this much explanation about commenting in Korea.
p.s. I apologize for
the grim tone of this post. I might sound slightly angry, too. But
that's how heavy the crisis is affecting the entire nation. We're
extremely saddened by what's happening especially as the situation
seems to grow more hopeless each day. Please join us in prayer for the
21 survivors. I believe that regardless of religion, ethnicity,
country, or anything, human life should stand above them all. Thank you.
