Social media and popular activism in a Korean contextThis chapter pays particular attention to the online users’ activism in connection with anti-
government protests. A causal approach (i.e. the online users’ political activism resulting in the vic-
tory of the protests) may hinder the understanding that our relationship with the social media is
always articulated within our changing views of society. We should be careful about wholly opti-
mistic views of social media, particularly the myth that the Internet emancipates the citizen from
authoritarian regimes (Song 2012, 119). Having illustrated this, an important characteristic of social
media is that online users tactically appropriate it (in the Korean context at least) to move beyond
the usual state-centric as well as web-portal centric limits of time, location, and politics. Instead, we
should assess how the changing relationship between this dynamic and the Internet is situated in this
context. I suggest that we should not view social media users’ activism as radical in nature. Rather,
we need to focus on online users’ daily practices in cyberspace in relation to their practices in society.
Notes
1 For example, Pandora TV, the premier video streaming service provider, had 30,860,000 page views
(PVs) in the first week of April 2010. This was a significant drop compared to the first week of April
2009, when its PVs numbered 50,100,000 (Herald Korea 2010).
2 This has since been altered, due to Google’s ubiquitous web crawler technology.
3 Candlelight vigils as a form of sociopolitical action, with online forums playing a central role in
disseminating information, are not a new phenomenon in South Korea. The first protest vigil was a
memorial ceremony for two schoolgirls who were killed by a U.S. military vehicle in June 2002. The
two soldiers driving the vehicle were found not guilty. A documentary about the trial broadcast on
Korean television fueled public anger against the U.S. military, leading thousands to carrying lit candles
to Seoul City Hall. The second (and nationwide) candlelight vigil was held in March 2004 to demon-
strate against an impending impeachment of former South Korean President Roh Moo-Hyun. As a
result, the Hannara-dang party, the opposition party that had presided over the president’s impeach-
ment, was defeated in the seventeenth National Assembly election (Hankyoreh 2004).
4 The diagram is based on my interpretation of journalist Kyung-Wha Song’s Candlelight flow chart.
Song illustrates the circulation and interaction between online communities, forums, UCC websites
and organizations on the ground (Song KW 2008).
5 During the same time period, Google abided by the Chinese government’s rules and censorship,
thereby seemingly contradicting its stance on Korea (BBC 2010).
6 According to the share of time used on the main sites of video streaming services, the top three sites,
DaumTVpot, YouTube, PandoraTV, shared 66 percent, with YouTube taking 25 percent, the highest
share in 2011. Naver, which had approximately 8,719 portal sites users, was ranked number 1 in the
portal sites preferences of Android mobile web users in 2011. Another interesting feature was that
Google was ranked number 2 (KoreanClick 2011).
7 As a result, the Korean scholarly discourse relating to cyberspace tended to shift focus from the online
forums to discussing the role of SNS, particularly in terms of its impact on grassroots efforts (Kim and
Choi 2012), its information sharing functionality (Kim and Kim 2011), and lastly its impact on political
activity (Kum 2011).
8 The Korean web portals’ sense of the Lee administration’s attitude to the Internet as a medium that
needed to be controlled interrupted the Internet’s development, resulting in domestic service providers
losing several market sectors to global companies: e.g. the SNS market to Twitter and the Streaming
Service Market to YouTube. Furthermore, the Lee administration’s rationale for expanding the real
name system, which was intended to protect cyber security, failed due to the impossibility of con-
trolling global Internet service providers. A series of hacking incidents occurred, including one that
leaked more than 90 percent of users’ personal information. Under the real name system the Korean
web servers held all users’ personal information including social registration numbers. The real name
system was subsequently abolished after the Constitutional Court ruled it unconstitutional in 2012
and Korean web portals began deleting the personal information of their users from their data systems
(Yonhap News 2012; Dong-A Daily 2012).
9 This was widely perceived as intentional political maneuvering rather than an example of the excessive
devotion of NIS officials (Yonhap News 2014).