i’ve been staying with my parents in busan since i got back to korea. will go up to seoul once i’ve got enough participants - anyone who can help? i’m looking for people living in seoul and edge-cities between the ages of 18 and 24, and also people from communication, entertainment, and service industries related to this age group - till then, i’m going to be here working and baby-sitting my new born nephew :)

few days ago i got a phone call from a lady who knew exactly which apartment i, well, my parents are living in. she said now KT’s putting a new network line into our complex (there are about 22 buildings in our complex) which meant that now we have a better Internet option - as we always do ;) actually, i think what the lady was talking about was FttH (fiber-to-the-home), which is not that new, really… it’s been widely deployed here since early last year.

i was about to feed my nephew so didn’t have enough time though i was quite interested to find out about this supposedely better connection. but the boy was crying and i really had to go, so i quickly said to her “we’re on a contract right now and we still have more than a year left with the current provider.” then immediately - much to my surprise - she said “oh, no problems. we’ll pay all the cost involved with switching including the penalty and (no doubt, same-day)installation. we’re also offering you free connection for the first three months plus a lot of gifts you can choose from.”

insane.

i thought.

these ‘gifts’ offered by ISPs are not a laughing matter here. they typically include things like an expresso machine, ipod, and cash. there was a report somewhere discussing the fierce competition in the Korean broadband market and how subscribers actually call their ISPs when they’re having problems with their computers (for example, i can expect my ISP to fix my Windows buggy/sillly behaviour that has nothing to do with the Internet or anything to do with networks). ISPs do whatever to please their subscribers to survive in this broadband jungle.

as i was feeding my nephew in my arms, i thought about the madness of this situation and also some major failures of global brands who tried to gain some share in this society with fast growing hyper-consumerist ethos (much of which can be attributed to the ppalippali/hurryhurry ethos).
some of the major examples include wal-mart and carrfour, the top two in the global food retail industry. USAToday reports:

“They failed to attract customers to the stores,” said S.K. Lee, a retail analyst at Hyundai Securities in Seoul, adding that housewives in particular were dissatisfied with food and beverage offerings.

Wal-Mart also has struggled in Japan, known for its finicky consumers, but has lately boosted its investment there. Last year, it made Seiyu Ltd., the nation’s fifth-largest chain with more than 400 stores, a subsidiary. But Seiyu said its loss widened in 2005 to 17.7 billion yen ($151 million).

Oh Seung-taek, an analyst at Hanwha Securities, says Britain-based Tesco PLC’s Home Plus chain, ranked No. 2 in South Korea, hired a Korean chief executive and made stores “friendly” to the needs of Korean shoppers, who don’t like a “warehouse-style” environment.

while i am all for local victories, i am curious and concerned about how korea’s going to fair in the global neo-liberal - or i could safely say, ‘western’ - model of economy, particularly how it’s isolating itself technologically on the Internet. it’s good to have fantastic locally developed and owned technologies, but what if they are monolingual and thus unable to communicate with non-local techs? is korea going to be an island? if so, how is it going to justify its existence as a node in the global network? i wonder.

This entry was posted on Friday, January 11th, 2008 at 9:15 pm and is filed under curiosity, korea. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.