Online communities in South Korea: a case study
The first phase of internet studies was dominated by a utopian versus dystopian vision of the new media, especially the internet, arguing whether it will bring about a new Enlightenment (Barlow 1995) or spread loneliness and disconnect people. The second stage marks the documentation of uses and users, online and offline activities and virtual communities (Wellman 2011). The third phase look at analytical and critical account for how the internet is embedded in everyday life and context (Silver 2000).
As ethnographic approach of cyberspace is getting more attention and internet culture is becoming more and more relevant, this paper will examine digital culture in the aspect of virtual communities within an Asian context and look at South Korean internet culture manifested by its virtual communities as an example to discuss the notion of digital culture in Asia in relation to the West.
Defining digital culture
Digital media is defined with digital, networked, interactive, hypertextual, automated and databased characteristics (Miller 2011). Miller (2011), gives an account for digital cultural forms consist of: context and the lack of one, variability, rhizome and process. Context and the lack of one was built on the idea that the reproduction of objects, artifacts made accessible for the mass on new media, lack a physical context. Space, distance, perspective, history and geographical elements are strip off and replaced by a new digital context. Dreyfus (2001) criticizes that this characteristic can lead to a God-like view of the world, where everything is viewed as a “universal equivalence” by people that has technological access at their fingertips. Variability suggests that users experience in digital media is personalized and customized so that it feels unique but the personalization process is not original but rather through manipulation of algorithms and archiving past data. Rhizome explains how the digital media is structured and one way to look at this is through a Wikipedia entry, or the principle of cartography (Miller 2011). One can go to a Wikipedia entry or a place on a map from any starting point within Wikipedia or the map. Process suggest that digital object is never static, or a completed product but is a process that will always get updated and has no end.
Culture is not a concept that can be understood within a single approach. However, this essay will look at culture from a social science perspective, in which culture is understood as shared understandings among a group of people with the building blocks consist of values, norms, symbols, language, beliefs and status (Giddens 2013).
So how does the “digital” can be merged with “culture” and what kind of norms or values does digital culture has? Is the new media enable a new kind of culture to be formed that has a distinct set of values and norms? Or is it merely a reflection of norms and values already existed in the offline world? Or does it lie in a complex middle of a dynamic relationship of these two terms? Deuze (2006), gives digital culture three principal components composed of participation, remediation and bricolage. Participation, a major concept identified with Jenkins’ convergence culture (Jenkins 2004), suggests that the new media has moved away from being a static models of production and consumption of media objects to a more consumer-driven and participatory process that anyone can collaborate. Remediation, a concept introduced in the work of Bolter and Grusin (1999), is the idea that new media not only separate itself from old media but also reproduce it. In this, Deuze (2006) adds distantiation, which means the manipulation of the dominant media to one’s individual needs to challenge the mainstream. This mass personalization, Deuze (2006) argues, can lead to “hyperindividualisation” of the society into personal public sphere. Bricolage suggests that people create media object by reusing and restructuring materials already existed, and within a rhizome-like structure of the digital media (Miller 2011), information gets published, shared, reused and linked.
These three concepts can be seen as the building blocks for digital culture, practiced by a highly individualized and globalized community. Deuze (2006) also made clear that these components do not form a culture within itself, but rather a shared etiquette for expression and reflection of ourselves on the internet.
The Asian context
Castells (1996) talked about the irrelevance of geographical space in the network society, suggesting that the network is timeless, nonspatial and placeless and sociological studies of digital culture should no longer be confined to geographical context since the internet is a transnational space. This idea is also supported by many theorists in the early 1990s, talking about human’s liberation from bodily marks of race, gender, the disembodiment of self, anonymity, and the multiple selves (Bell 2001).
Although these scholars did open up many important question regarding the fluidity of the self, sexuality, gender, the third phase of Internet studies criticize this dualist way of thinking about the internet as an independent and separated world free from geographical and traditional culture boundaries. Wellman and Gulia (1997) emphasized that people carry their gender, life cycles, culture, status, offline connection baggage in online interactions.
This is where the Asian context can blend in.
Rao and Mendoza (2005), suggests that the history of the internet should be studied in a more inclusive and transnational approach, consider internet history of countries such as Japan, South Korea and India and its contribution to global technological advancement important for discussion. Furthermore, language barriers should not be overlooked in studying cyberculture and one should avoid falling into the trap of treating English as the only voice on the internet or any kind of new media.
However, Asia is a problematic term. We cannot speak of one Asia because Asia is not one (Acharya 2010). Speaking of one Asia can be a trap into homogenizing the complex and diverse cultural norms of East, Central and Southeast Asia and depicting essentialism. Furthermore, it is also important to note that “Asian values” is not an inherent trait but an ideology encouraged by leaders such as Lee Kuan Yew and Mahathir Mohamad promoting collectivism as Asian common identity (Acharya 2012). However, this ideology had influenced the way most people, especially those in East Asia identified themselves and thus, becomes a cultural baggage.
Virtual Communities
Most studies on virtual communities pay attribution to Tonnies (1955) concepts of Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft in classical sociology. Gemeinschaft refers to a densely knit community based on kinship, blood relation, interdependence and muti-dimensional and historical ties to the land they live in. Gesellschaft is the opposite individualized social formation in which people are tied through rational needs that based on choices, formal contracts and convenience. This idea of community being lost due to modern progression, carries its essence to many academic studies fearing that the new media can lead to the loss of community. The strand opposed to this is the “community saved” argument, stating that digital will regain community. Both of these strands reflects a nostalgia sentiment about community. However, in the third strand, mostly identified with Barry Wellman’s concept of networked individualism (Rainie and Wellman 2012), liberate the concept of community. Wellman asserts that the idea of community is deeply connected with hierarchy and bureaucratic society, and in the network society, people have a looser, more fragmented network that provides opportunity for more diverse relationships. Wellman’s networked individual functions more like a connected individual and less like a group member, having partial membership in multiple ties and less likely to have permanent membership in one settled, densely knit group. This concept can apply to most developed nations. These networked individuals, Rainie and Wellman (2012) argues, fit in Castells’ virtual communitarians culture, which, together with the culture of techno elites, hackers and entrepreneurs, shaped the culture of the network. It is also important to note that participatory culture, a defining component for digital culture according to Deuze (2006), is manifested from the virtual communitarians, through conducting soft surveillance on what others do online.
However, Wellman’s networked individualism received a number of criticisms and sceptics from many anthropologists on his emphasis on personal media and personalized community, asserting that the distinction between personal and mass media is not always defined and too complex to draw such conclusion. Furthermore, Postill (2008) asserts that there is a sense of egocentric in the idea of personal media of the individuals, and this type of media can be used as a form of mass media, with information offered to the mass, by elites, rather than creating communal network. Evans (2013) express the same fear and adds that this type of networked individualism could be taken advantage by businesses to make more profit, rather than encourage community.
Evans (2013) went on to conclude that virtual communities are more likely to be a replica of offline long standing social formation and what the media does is to reflect, rather than transform to a new type. She also jumps to a conclusion about virtual community being a counterfeit community of weak ties without real commitment. This view is similar Jones (1995) “pseudocommunity”, and “lifestyle enclaves”, criticizing the lack of complex interpendency in a community of shared interest.
South Korean online communities
Internet in South Korea
South Korea deployed the TCP/IP network in 1982, mainly used for research and education, making it one of the earliest countries to have global internet connection. The 1990s saw a remarkable growth of commercial internet, especially the introduction of high speed broadband after Asian Financial Crisis in 1997 (Chon et al 2005), thanks to government push in improving internet infrastructure which has led South Korea into becoming one of the most IT advanced nations with the fastest average internet speed and 85.7% of total population active on the internet (Internet Live Stats 2016). It is also worth noting that, the technological development in South Korea is characterized by chaebols, Korean for conglomerate.
There is also the rise of democracy in Korea around the late 1990s (Han and Nasir 2016), not because of the internet was introduced, but as a result of the corrupted political landscape and bureaucratic chaebols characterized before the Asian financial crisis. Given this new emergence of democracy coincides with the introduction of Korea’s high speed internet, digital culture of South Korea was influenced by the democratic sentiment at the time.
Online communities
Online communities in South Korea has its upbringing in the very first day of commercial internet. Daum, its first portal, opened in 1997 with a free email service and a public forum service, which is more often called internet café and remains one of the largest online communities until now. If the early history of virtual communities in the West was shaped by a number of early adopters, techno elites and geeks, Korea’s early online communities was embraced by a large proportion of population, mainly youth (Ok 2011). In 2003, there are 99.1% of Korean millennials use the internet daily, with 89.1% of them participating in multiple online communities, and each person is said to belong to an average of 13.7 communities (Cho 2006). This landscape rings true to Wellman’s assertion about how people are more likely to have partial membership in many communities, rather than a permanent membership in few.
Daum and Naver
Two of the major portals of online communities is Daum and Naver. The two function on an open public forum, or café and host a variety of discussion topics ranging from entertainment-led hobbies, idols, popular culture to more serious ones such as family, education, politics and religion.
In addition, Daum and Naver are also hotbeds for electronic fan fictions writing. These fanfiction stories often feature pop stars and idols involving in romantic relationships, sometimes sexual explicit and homosexual ones (Ok 2011). It is also worth noting that, fanfiction writing have existed in South Korea before the internet, in the form of printed fanzines, with most of the content being heterosexual and less sexual explicit (Ok 2011). This participatory fan culture aligns with the participation components in the aforementioned writing of Deuze (2006). In addition, the electric fanfiction phenomenon also displays remediation and distantiation where electronic fanfiction is a kind of remediation of the traditional printed fanzines, being individualized by authors’ open-minded opinion about queerness, or identity, what would be a taboo if published on mainstream media.
However, Daum and Naver doesn’t stop there. Apart from being internet cafes, these two sites are also hosted as news and knowledge sources. Naver has a feature called Knowledge Search that allows people to ask questions and receive answers from either other users or an open “Wiki” written by Naver users (Shin 2014), in which information is constantly being reproduced and reused and can be seen as a bricoleur activity.
Ilbe
Apart from multi feature sites like Daum or Naver, there are also online communities that function on imageboard and feature online discussion only. There is DC Inside, founded in 1999 and first started as a community for photography and digital camera enthusiasts, has been the pioneer in Korean meme culture (Jay 2012). Ilbe, started in 2010, a community born out from a DC Inside’s sub gallery called Comedy Program, is famous for its controversial extreme conservatism, hate speech and misogyny. Ilbe claims itself as a community of retards. Whoever joins Ilbe, regardless of their identity, will be reduced to one collective identity as a retard (Jay 2012). This kind of downward standardization that gives Ilbe the freedom to hate speech and many wrongdoings. This phenomenon clash with the Western ideological idea of individualization of society and optimism about the decentralized, non-hierarchal internet.
Ilbe users motivation and actions were driven mostly by a collectivistic identity as retards. Ilbe users call themselves Ilbe bugs and self-identified as losers and retards. This identity is stressed, throughout their comments, discussion and online comics. They also have a reputation of creating internet war with other major online communities in South Korea by posting mean, sarcastic comments and using comics to insult the whole community (Jay 2013).
Apart from Ilbe activities within the websites, Ilbe users also have a reputation of wrongdoings in the offline world including frequent vandalism; mocking of a grieving father of a victim in the Sewol ferry sinking accident, announcing a public hunger strike to demand government rescue efforts, in which Ilbe members were caught binge-eating near the place he protested (Lee 2014); setting off a homemade bomb during a public event of a left wing activist being accused of empathizing North Korea (IntroToKorea 2015). It can be seen that Ilbe users sense of community is largely characterized and defined by geographical context and geopolitical ideal. This bring to the argument that even if the network is not place-based, one must keep in mind that geographical concept can also be ideological and exist without a physical context and thus influences how people from different groups, countries, or regions utilize the components of digital media and create a diverse internet culture.
Conclusion
In conclusion, digital culture in Asia is not the same with that of the West; however, the source of differences does not come from inherent characteristics, but rather characteristics constructed by social, historical factors and therefore governs how people contribute to digital culture. The case of South Korea’s online communities has shown that although there are similarities about the logic of remediation, participation and bricolage in the case of Daum and Naver, the conclusion that individualism will be the future of the network society and internet will continue to be globalized need to be reexamined in more non-Western contexts.
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