Tuesday, June 17, 2008

Korea's new generation of 'Web 2.0' protesters

June 1987, Seoul's City Hall Plaza reverberated with a chant that signaled the end of military rule in South Korea: "Dokjetado!" or "Down with the dictatorship!" In June this year, the plaza has once again become a rallying point for crowds calling for the removal of an unpopular government: "Out with Lee Myung Bak!" But the similarity ends there. And in those differences is the challenge for President Lee and anyone else engaged in politics in this highly wired country, where the Internet has merged with the South Korean penchant for street demonstrations. "The Internet fits Koreans' quick-paced temperament," said Kim Il Young, a political scientist at Sungkyunkwan University in Seoul. "As you have seen recently, when the nation's world-class Internet infrastructure, its nationalism and its hot temper all come together, you have a major conflagration." In the 1980s, streets around the plaza lit up with orange flames as students clashed with the police, trading firebombs for tear gas. The military dictators had a clear-cut enemy; they arrested activist leaders. In contrast, the people jamming the same streets this month looked almost like cheerful vacationers on a mass picnic - teenagers in school uniforms, mothers pushing baby carriages, fathers with children on their shoulders, singing and shouting slogans. And the police investigating who organized the country's biggest antigovernment protests in two decades ended up rummaging in cyberspace. When Lee agreed in April to lift a five-year-old import ban on U.S. beef, despite widespread fears that the meat might not be safe from mad cow disease, it quickly became a hot topic on the Internet, first among teenage girls gathering at fan Web sites for television personalities, and later at Agora, a popular online discussion forum at the Web portal Daum. There, people suggested that they stop just talking and take to the streets. When a high school student began a petition on Agora calling for Lee's impeachment, it gathered 1.3 million signatures within a week. The police were caught off-guard on May 2 when thousands of teenagers networking through Agora and coordinating via text messages poured into central Seoul, holding candles and chanting "No to mad cow!" The mainstream media and the government ignored them at first. But protesters stepped forward as "citizen reporters," conducting interviews, taking photographs and, thanks to the country's high-speed wireless Internet, uploading videos to their blogs and Internet forums. One video showing the police beating a female protester caused outrage on the Internet and prompted even more people to join the demonstrations... IHT

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