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.
Web users in one of the world’s most-wired countries seldom “Google” anything. They “Naver” it
… When NHN, an online gaming company, set up the search portal in 1999, the site looked like a grocery store where most of the shelves were empty. Like Google, Naver found there simply was not enough Korean text in cyberspace to make a Korean search engine a viable business.
“So we began creating Korean-language text,” said Lee Kyung Ryul, an NHN spokesman. “At Google, users basically look for data that already exists on the Internet. In South Korea, if you want to be a search engine, you have to create your own database.”
this beloved nei-buh (we don’t have anything close to the v or r-sound in korean)’s moving out, it seems.
joins.com reports naver lovers are becoming increasingly not so fond of the idea ‘love thy naver’ and now migrating to other portal sites (notably daum) - and they have good reasons for it, too. naver has been implementing strange restrictions on user partipation, especially political ones: to start with, mid this year, users found that they were no longer able to leave comments on individual political news items. instead, they were able to participate in the general politics discussion boards. excuse me? yes, precisely.
there is a major reason behind this change, apprently: the upcoming presidential election. naver feared its possible involvement in fierce political debates and how they could maintain ‘fairness’ in discussions and promotions. excuse me? yes, precisely… for the second time.
the following is a monthly comparison of news hits between naver (grey) and daum (black) and changes occurred on naver:
May 19: redesign of new site
Jun 22: national eleciton commision announced banning on supporting/criticising specific parties/candidates online (wha-?)
Sep 10: no comments on individual politics news item
Oct 28: introduction of the ‘comments hiding’ function
what’s really shocking is the national election commission’s (nec) approach. read this global voices article (Korea: Role of the National Election Commission for the Coming Presidential Election) for more info. basically if you wanted to post anything like what’s happening on youtube (most obviously example’s hilary vs. obama videos), you’d have to be prepared to face one year sentence or a fine up to 200 million korean won. how is this even possible? do they even understand the basic concept of democracy? do they understand what this thing called internet is all about? since they’re also from Korea, the most connected nation in the world, i thought they would have at least a little bit of idea. and how wrong was i? am i the only wrong one here?
naver’s still the top visitor-magnet in korea. it’s closely followed by daum, and cyworld and nate are 3rd and 4th respectively, which means, if you combine these two (cyworld is a sub-division of nate), they would actually be the no.1. i’ve been talking about cyworld and nate (especially jishik-in service: can be translated as knowledge-in or person with knowledge) with my research participants, and it seems nate talk is gaining popularity. this is where you could talk about practically anything - e.g. problems with their current romantic situations, suggestions for good restaurants in a particular suburbs, etc. anything. it promotes comments, and my research participants were enthusiastic about reading the comments. they can be very humorous, and users can vote for the best comments, too.
naver’s knowledge-in service was absolutely brilliant. yahoo and daum made replicas, not only within korea but also on other yahoo! international sites. it seems pretty obvious that naver’s making a big mistake. yes, there’s political pressure, but portals also have the responsibility to provide a safe venue for people to communicate their ideas, considering portals mean nothing without voluntarily participating individuals. yes, for pragmatic reasons, portals need their own databases to survive here in korea where people speak korean, not english. this may present better opportunities for the portals to actually control what’s stored in those databases. but who stocked the empty shelves? who changed the storage space into interactive knowledge space?
naver has recently announced that they would work with and in support for the association of korean independent film and video. great. well done to you there. but i’m confused now. and this move makes me question your motives. i am not forgetting that postmodern society does not exist without capitalism. if users sense foolish tyranny (whether secretely or consipicuously) by the portal that they used to ‘live in’ without proper justification that is understandable within the current techno-social context, they will abandon the place. they may return sometime as long as their user information does not expire, but the domain of portal is diverse, competitive, and unpredictable.
naver relied heavily on people. right from the beginning, it not only saw what they could do, but it was basically built upon them. abandoning them like this is simply wrong. no excuse will do. let us love our neighbours. talking together would be a good first step, don’t you think?
one of my supervisors, michael keane, has published a new book recently.
it’s called created in china: the great new leap forward.
i must admit that i haven’t read the book yet. however, as a student, colleague, and respectful fan of michael and his work, i have no doubt this book will masterfully guide us through the mysterious and massive land of contemporary chinese culture and industries relative to the idea of creativity, something many of us are still finding hard to even draw a rough sketch of in our heads.
re-adjusting to my ‘home culture’ has been quite fun.
it’s strange to be socially, racially, and immediately accepted.
using my australian mobile phone’s proving to be exorbitant, and i’m going to be here for a while, so i’ve decided to get a korean mobile phone… yes! very excited. currently it’s very cheap to get a phone if one’s prepared to subscribe to KTF or LGT. SKT, once the most popular, has been losing popularity for a while, especially since the launch of KTF’s new 3G+ service, Show (but largely because of the concurrent ‘free phone offers’ for those who’s bringing their numbers over to KTF; LGT offer the same kind of deals, but people don’t seem to have much respect for this company that started with PCS phone services). i’ve previously talked - briefly - about how video call was painted to be the next big thing in Korea, and yes, Show’s mainly about that. however, as i’ve found out by talking to my friends here, it’s still considered to be ‘too expensive’ and thus ‘not worth it’ - as a video phone user (of a few years), i’m not surprised. i never really liked and rarely used the feature. let us be private multitaskers as we are and desire to be, perhaps ;)
anyway, STK’s keen to claim the emperor(ess)’s seat again in the over-saturated Korean mobile world, and they’re ambitiously going to release 7 new samsung phones in a few weeks. not sure if it’s worth waiting. i know that i would like SKT - my roaming phone’s with KTF and the connection’s been very unsatisfactory. besides, i would really like to try the RFID ordering system at the Shinchon McDonald’s. i don’t go to mcdonald’s pretty much ever (except when my niece wants an oreo mcflurry), but i would really like to try this service. if unable, i think i’ll just grab anyone there and ask if i could use their phone :)
SKT has also done some very interesting tv ads about video calls - ‘mastering video calling’ (but interestingly, it’s really about how to look beautiful for it); there have been four lessons so far:
more interestingness when considered in relation to:
some of Larissa Hjorth’s work on gendered use of the mobile phone in Korea
Hjorth, Larissa. “Snapshots of Almost Contact: Gendered Camera Phone Practices and a Case Study in Seoul, Korea.” Cultural Space and Public Sphere in Asia. Ed. Shin Dong Kim. Seoul, Korea, 2006: 211-32.
Hjorth, Larissa, and Heewon Kim. “Being There and Being Here: Gendered Customising of Mobile 3g Practices through a Case Study in Seoul.” Convergence 11.2 (2005): 49-55.
This popular teen boy band known as Dong Bang Shin Gi (DBSG or DBSK - in Chinese cultures, TVXO) officially became the public ambassador for the Korean e-government last week.
They’re very popular in Korea, and in many Asian countries; they’re probably one of the strongest forces behind the Korean Wave at the moment, music-wise anyway. And no, I don’t know who did their hair.
Korea’s been doing alright in the area of e-governance, regardless of what’s happening in the realm of actual governance and politics. So more accurately, Korea’s been doing alright in terms of e-government readiness. It ranked 5th in the UN’s Global E-government Readiness Report 2005, following USA, Denmark, Sweden, and UK.
South Korea remains one of the world leaders in e-government. Its central services portal, egov.go.kr, continues to offer citizens the opportunity to complete a vast array of government related transactions through several payment options, including digital currency. It also provides a “service cart” similar to the shopping cart feature on e-commerce sites, allowing the user to select, apply for, and pay for several services in one transaction. The site also features the ability for users to register in order to personalize services.
The Republic of Korea is also home to one of the most impressive e-procurement implementations through its continued development of the Government e-Procurement System (GePS) as a single window for public procurement, which provides full integration (www.g2b.go.kr)
– original article here
Having a popular boy band as the public ambassador would definitely have a positive effect on attracting young (in their teens) citizens. I personally think that it would’ve been great if more focus had been placed on senior citizens or even people in ther 40+. These are the people who have to deal with citizenry issues right now, but without much needed education or training to use what’a already there. Young ones, for sure, will naturally learn to use these services when they need to, because it’s simply easier and more convenient for them to go online and ’sort things out’ than going to little and big offices scattered all around the city.
I don’t know. Perhaps this is the government’s attempt at meeting the demand in one of the most desired career sector in Korea right now: public servant. According to the Bureau of East Asian and Pacific Affairs, Korea is currently the 11th largest economy in the world. However, the element of “stability” in career has been probably “the most important” element of consideration ever since the Asian Financial Crisis, when many people suddenly lost their jobs (and their lives, for some). There are people - many older people, including my parents - who are still suffering from the loss/es occurred during that time. And they are suffering without any support - or intention to support - from the government, not only financially but also welfare-wise… well in any way, really. So it really does annoy me that these people are ignored yet again when they are really in need of consideration. Foolishness.
