Social media and popular activism in a Korean contextIn October 2014 another episode of cyber asylum seeking took place when Kakao Talk, a
smartphone messaging app market leader in Korea, acknowledged they had provided personal
information to investigative bodies. The company claimed they received 147 warrants from
intelligence or investigative authorities, and that they handed over to prosecutors the personal
information of a few users in the first half of that year (MBM Money 2014). This dilemma was
magnified when we consider that the personal information passed on related not only to a
specified user, but also to those individuals the Kakao Talk user communicated with. That com-
munication log was reported as remaining on Kakao’s servers.
When the news relating to Korean SNS surveillance was reported, Kakao Talk user levels
dropped quickly. In its place a new messaging app called Telegram, a Berlin-based open source
messaging service—and one without Korean language support—became a local sensation. Tele-
gram fandom picked up when it became known that it did not store logs and information on
its server. Telegram even offered a service whereby the user sets up a function to delete the
message automatically once the receiver reads it. The number of Korean users of Telegram
increased twentyfold to a total of 521,903 users between September 28, 2014 and October 4,
2014 (ISPlus 2014). Such a massive cyber migration had a great effect on Korean messaging app
companies by making it clear users did not take privacy and security matters lightly. For instance,
Daum Kakao officially apologized for their compliance with the Korean government and set
up a new privacy policy, strengthened data encryption, and shortened the amount of time per-
sonal messages are saved on their servers (MBN Money 2014). Again, although Kakao Talk is
still the dominant messaging platform, ordinary SNS users’ cyber asylum has expanded Korean
social media culture by embracing the technology that served their daily needs. Further more,
their cyber traversality indirectly changed the logic of the SNS game by forcing the Korean
SNS messaging service leaders to change their business practices, as well as revealing the state’s
implicit cyber control.
In summary, the cyber asylum seeker’s phenomenon is aptly expressed in what Arjun
Appadurai calls “the work of imagination.” In this way we see Korea as “a space of contesta-
tion in which individuals and groups seek to annex the global into their own practice of the
modern” (1996, 4). In moving their virtual and physical territory both to and from cyberspace,
via global Internet service providers, the cyber asylum seekers act against, rather than escape, the
restrictions put forth by the government.
Michel de Certeau and the Korean social media constellation
Michel de Certeau’s practice theory offers an appropriate approach to the transformative struc-
tures underlying social media-based activism in Korea. In de Certeau’s view, there is an indissol-
ubility between places within space. The common notion of Internet laws being dictated by state
actors alone is misleading. It is misleading to conceive of cyberspace without acknowledging the
authority in design and structure by both state and non-state actors. Foucault’s (1991) panopti-
cism becomes an obsolete apparatus with actors operating in a global context. In de Certeau’s
practice theory, the morphology of social media presents a clearer picture of online users’ acti-
vities and tactical appropriation of cyberspace and cyber culture. Online users’ content can never
be fully eradicated due to hyperlinking and caching. Their voices become part of an oral tradi-
tion, harbouring a flexibility that cannot be governed by written law, as reflected in de Certeau’s
stance on the power of the powerless. The space where content once resided can be deserted,
but the users’ voices can be found in other places in cyberspace.
This traversality of the Internet user, in their not being constrained by place, is central to our
understanding of Korean cyberspace. As reflected in de Certeau’s notion of the power of the