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Controlling Chaos? The Struggle with New Media in

South Korea

John Rodgers

“It’s ordered chaos,” my father said as we stepped out of a Seoul City bus following a frenetic ride through the metropolis of 10 million people, among throngs of commuter cars, taxis, trucks, other buses, motorcycles and scooters (which slice between the larger vehicles), military vehicles and police cars. The city buses are notorious for their part in and negotiation of the chaos, cutting across lanes to reach a screeching halt at a sidewalk stop where passengers (most knowing—to the second—when the bus would arrive due to a phone application that tracks the buses) hurry on before the driver darts back into traffic. If one were to look at those drivers, passengers, sidewalk pedestrians, there is a great likelihood that they’d either be on, staring into or holding a phone, a phone that serves as a perpetual connection to another chaos (perhaps less ordered), a chaos that poses a threat to the stability of a nation which already stands on a peninsula divided by war only 60 years gone, and halted with an armistice, its foe in the North a persistent threat developing nuclear weapons, launching attacks at sea, and most recently, in 2010, shelling an island off the west coast. Imagining chaos is not hard to do in Korea—all one has to do is look at recent history or recall a rush-hour ride through the city’s clamoring corridors. Yet the more you live amongst this chaos the less you worry about it. In March and April of 2013, following an unprecedented set of North Korea actions—a third nuclear test, withdrawal from the 1953 armistice agreement, the closing of the Kaesong Industrial Complex (an inter-Korean endeavor), among others—little distress existed among the people of South Korea.1 As Russian scholar of Asia and specialist in Korean studies

1. http://www.voanews.com/content/south-korea-to-suspend-operations-at-kaesong-joint-industrial-

zone/1636786.html

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Andrei Lankov wrote at the time, “The average South Korean’s calm indifference is understandable: he or she has been through similar ‘crises’ many times” (2013). Here one might plug in chaos for crises, surrounded with the same sarcastic quotes. So while the populous carried on with business as usual, the government scrambled to assess the threat level. President-elect at that time, Park Geun-hye stated: “The North’s nuclear test poses a significant threat to the Korean Peninsula and also international peace and impedes trust-building between South and North Korea…In no case will the new administration tolerate North Korea’s nuclear arms”; later the government issued a statement declaring the test an “unacceptable threat” (Lee, E.J., 2013). The state’s responsibility to protect its people could be no clearer. Indeed, a threat could lead to a crisis and, ultimately, chaos, here in the case of war. But other potential threats loom, and the state would be negligent to ignore them. I refer back to all those ubiquitous phones now, to the inter- and hyper-connected people of South Korea, a population, according to the CIA World Factbook, of 48,955,203 (July 2013 est.) with 53.1 million mobile subscriptions at the end of 2011 (NewMedia TrendWatch, 2013). More phones than people—some students I taught had two phones, one for the teacher to confiscate and the other to use surreptitiously. There are a reported 40,329,660 Internet users as of 2012 (10,012,400 on Facebook).2 In addition, 35 million people use the Korean social networking and microblogging sites Cyworld and Nate (Yoon, 2011). And as Table 1 shows, smartphone penetration is rapidly increasing.

Table 1. Smartphone penetration and addiction. (WSJ Live 2013).

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Estimates project that by the end of 2013, 90 percent of South Korean mobile subscriptions will be for smartphones; for perspective, it’s estimated that 48.5 percent of U.S. subscriptions will be. Nevertheless, it’s important to understand that nonsmartphone mobile users can still access the Internet, just on a less user-friendly interface. South Korea’s rapid adoption and development of technology puts it in a future technological territory replete with lessons to be learned by the rest of the planet. I recall the Bill Gates quote that Jack Lule referenced: “Never before in history has innovation offered promise of so much to so many in so short a time” (Lule, 2012, p. 60). That promise has been fulfilled in South Korea, but now the implications of such innovation are emerging as, in Brian McNair’s words, “consequences of chaos,” consequences ongoing and unpredictable given the warp speed of modern technological development (McNair asserts that, overall, the consequences are positive) (McNair, 2006). Just as the South Korean government must stay vigilant against North Korean threats, it also finds itself grappling with the potential consequences of this new technological order where an ever-more wired public spends an increasing part of its day in a virtual public sphere, reading, watching, commenting, posting etc., creating popular culture (as J. McGregor Wise put it), de- and reterritorializing, constantly reimagining themselves, “meaning making,” and all the while, potentially doing something that could threaten the economic and social stability of the nation. This last point stands at the center of my thesis. As we blast into this fifth stage of media, the Digital, (Oral, Script, Print and Electronic coming before) it’s critical to exercise some caution. As Lule wrote:

I do not see globalization or media proceeding—or advancing— along an inevitable, inexorable path of progress. Media— and globalization as well—have developed sporadically, erratically, in fits and starts, driven by human needs, desires, and actions, resulting in great benefits and sometimes greater harm. (Lule, 2012, p. 38)

2. Internet World Stats 2012, Q2. http://www.internetworldstats.com/stats3.htm#asia

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the South Korean public, especially as they relate to New Media (blogs and social networking sites (SNS)) and the South Korean government’s application of old and new laws in response to those behaviors it has deemed threatening and harmful, I intend to examine an attempt at controlled chaos. I return first to that ever-wired public sphere that I mentioned above in order to reference McNair’s inclusion of a 2003 reassessment by Eriksen and Weigard of Jurgen Habermas’s view of the contemporary public sphere because it aptly describes the situation in which new media operates, where “info anarchy” thrives, humming with misinformation, factoids, lies et al.

Late-modern society is characterized by dominant discourses, world views and forms of understanding which are put under pressure [as] new, more unconstrained patterns of communication emerge…and are in constant competition. The public sphere has become anarchistic…it is vulnerable to perversions and communication disturbances… it is a medium for unlimited communication. (McNair, 2006, p. 14)

McNair claims that this anarchy can be both “creative” and “destructive.” Surely it depends on who acts as the judge. As I develop my thesis we will first look at the laws that existed in Korea long before the appearance of the Internet—laws specifically related to North Korea and Cold War elements—as well as newly created edicts. I will also provide an overview of recent North Korean military provocations to accurately represent the South’s realities. This will be followed by specific instances of new media usage that drew the government’s attention and resulted in legal action of varying degrees and outcomes.

Framework for Control

The National Security Law was formed and enacted during a tumultuous time in Korean history following the 35-year Japanese colonization of the peninsula, which ended at the conclusion of World War II, and just two years before the Korean War. Having spent 30 years

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lobbying for Korean independence in China and America, Syngman Rhee returned after World War II and campaigned for the unification and independence of Korea (Syngman Rhee, 2013). He was elected president in 1948, and enacted the National Security Law (NSL) the same year as a means to repress the left-wing movement, a movement that had fought more vigorously against Japanese Colonization and, post-Colonization, sought peaceful reunification with the North, and abolishment of colonial legacies while Rhee saw unification possible only by force; an anti-North ideology formed the foundation of the conservative camp (Cho, 1997). The NSL acted as a means to identify, apprehend, and punish, sometimes by death, those seen as advocating for the North in any way. Ironically, scholars agree that the NSL was modeled after Japan’s Security Maintenance Law, which was used to squash the Korean liberation movement during the 35-year colonization period (Cho, 1997). Rather than outline the entire three-chapter, 24-article NSL, I will instead focus on the areas that have been most applied and most criticized. First, the NSL repeatedly refers to “Anti-State” groups which are defined as “domestic or foreign organizations or groups whose intentions are to conduct or assist infiltration of the Government or to cause national disturbances” (Kraft, 2012). “National disturbances” is left open for interpretation. The part of the NSL that has been most utilized over the years is Article 7, which punishes those who “praise, encourage, disseminate or cooperate” with an anti-state group; violators can receive imprisonment of up to seven years (Kraft, 2012). Additionally—and this strikes closer to the content of chaos—those who “create or spread false information which may disturb national order” face a minimum prison term of two years (Kraft, 2012). And as if to preclude any limitations of the law, those who “create, import, duplicate, possess, transport, disseminate, sell, or acquire documents, arts or other publications” that violate Article 7 will be punished “according to the violation” (Kraft, 2012). Unknowingly, President Rhee created a law that provides the modern Korean government with the necessary rhetorical mechanism (straight out of the Cold War) to exert some control in a world of New Information and Communication Technologies (NICTs), information anarchy, and inter(activity), as McNair called them.

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With the increasing role of technology in Korean life, the government established a number of commissions to attempt to oversee and control the transformation of society, the most recent coming in 2008 with the establishment of the Korea Communication Standards Commission (KCSC). The message from KCSC Chairman Man Park on its webpage is: The Korea Communications Standards Commission was established to safeguard the public nature and fairness of broadcasting content, to promote a sound Internet culture, and to create a safe online environment.

Broadcasting and the Internet communications services have become indispensable necessities for people living in today’s ever so fast changing information society. They are indeed deeply ingrained in our day-to-day lives. Through careful examination of their content, the Korea Communications Standards Commission pledges to spearhead initiatives to deliver safe media that ensure people with an enhanced quality of life. (Korea Communications Standards Commission, 2013)

Among many other things, the KCSC enforces the Electronic Communication Fundamental Law a dizzying collection of articles and clauses outlining standards for electronic communication use. As it is not necessary for me to go into great detail, I will only refer to Clause 1 under Article 47: “A person spreading a false rumor maliciously intending to damage the public interest by using an electronic machine can be imprisonment for under five years or given a fine of under 50,000,000 won ($50,000)” (Korea Communications Standards Commission, 2013). Article 21 of the Korean Constitution (adopted on July 17, 1948, and amended nine times subsequently) presents an interesting duality regarding freedom of expression by first stating that, “all citizens shall enjoy freedom of speech and the press,” then qualifying that, “neither speech nor the press shall violate the honor or rights of other persons nor undermine public morals or social ethics. Should speech or the press violate the honor or rights of other persons, claims may be made for the damage resulting therefrom” (Constitutional Court of Korea).

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Clearly there is room for censorship with these words depending on the interpretation of honor, public morals and social ethics. Thus the government has established a broad legal framework to coerce and regulate threats and agents of chaos. Yet, as I will detail later, the executive branch, led by the president, seems to have the final say in actions taken against violators while the Prosecutor’s Office carries out the indictment and litigation in courts where judges have increasingly, of late, acquitted the accused.

North Korean Threats and Realities

Just before 9:30 p.m. on March 26, 2010, the Cheonan, a South Korean naval corvette was split in half by an underwater explosion, and quickly sank off the west coast of the Korean peninsula not far from the Northern Limit Line (NLL) that separates the North and South—46 sailors died (Cha, 2010). Though various conspiracy theories circulated, a joint investigative team determined that a North Korean torpedo had scuttled the ship (JIG, 2010). Given the location and the history of naval clashes between the two states since the Korean War, most of the population suspected the North as soon as news emerged of the tragedy, though the North denied involvement. Nonetheless, the Internet enabled conspiracy theories to circulate far and wide, and fed a populous naturally suspicious of its government’s hegemony, a government that was still tinkering with democracy, a government that had erred more than once, persecuting its own people during and after the war through a series of military dictatorships (Lee, 2010).3 Among all of this was the reminder that the country remained in a place of war, that the specter of military conflict might never depart—the embers of the Korean War glowed within the Korean social imaginary.4 Eight months later on November 23, those embers came afire again when North Korean artillery shells bombarded Yeonpyeong Island, also off the west coast of Korea in the Yellow Sea near the NLL, killing two marines and injuring 21 citizens—this was the first bombing of South

3. Further elaboration will come below.4. In Globalization & Media (2012), Jack Lule refers to Jacques Lacan’s emphasis of “the impact of society and culture on people and their psyches” (pg. 53).

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Korean land since the Korean War (Kim, 2010). The North claimed thatSouth Korean military exercises in the region had prompted the attack. Images of the smoking and smoldering island rapidly spread across all media, and little room remained for denial. The North had attacked, the South had returned fire, scrambled fighter jets, and consulted with the U.S. over potential escalation. In an official statement at the time President Lee said, “The North’s shelling of Yeonpyeong Island is an undeniable provocation against South Korea…we will never tolerate the North’s indiscriminate attack on civilians” (Ser, 2010). The stakes could not have been higher. As one editorial put it:

The latest attack - the most aggressive since the 1950-1953 Korean War - underscores our vulnerability. If we cannot suppress the erratic threats from North Korea, it will put not only the region, but the entire world, at risk. Together with the international community, we should respond with wisdom and calm.

An armed conflict on the Korean Peninsula involves the United States under the military alliance pact. The two countries must mount a powerful defense. As North Korea’s patron, China will inevitably have to get deeply involved, as it needs regional security to sustain its economic growth and rising global hegemony. (Kang, 2010)

The anti-North ideology with which President Rhee infused the nation in 1948 found itself revivified along with the Cold War frame through which it was created. Moreover, the internationalization of the state takes form under “international community” and the need for intermestic politics emerges (earlier the editorial states “North Korea’s heavy artillery attack on the inhabited South Korean island of Yeonpyeong is clearly an armed attack against a UN member”) whereby this is not just a peninsular or even regional issue but one of global interconnectedness able to disrupt the entire system (i.e. the Butterfly Effect5) if it were to escalate into war (Pieterse, 2009; McNair, 2006). No further military conflicts took place as the regional players—

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China, Russia, Japan, and the United States—maneuvered to calm tensions and restore stability. Nevertheless, instability and uncertainty loomed over the Korean peninsula reaffirming the need for vigilance within the government and citizenry, especially state vigilance given its responsibility to protect the people.

National Disturbances

From 2008 to 2011, South Korea experienced what one could easily describe as national disturbances, under any definition of the phrase, as 2010’s military clashes illustrate. In 2006 the U.S. and South Korean governments began negotiations over a bilateral free trade agreement, and 10 months later, in April of 2007, signed the United States-Korea Free Trade Agreement (KORUS FTA) (Choe, 2007). Things appeared to be moving forward into early 2008 until Korea’s ruling conservative party, led by President Lee Myung-bak, began a push for the ratification of the agreement in the National Assembly, and news emerged about one specific point of contention: the full resumption of U.S. beef imports, which had been banned after an outbreak of mad cow disease (Creutzfeldt–Jakob (vCJD) disease) in the United States in 2003 (Jung, 2008). Agents of chaos swirled into action, especially those in new media, using the fear trigger and hyper-adversarialism (a term coined by The Atlantic writer James Fallows) (McNair, 2006). Rumors filled cyberspace and spilled onto the streets—Koreans were genetically predisposed to mad cow disease; consuming the meat could cause sudden death; the disease could spread through soil, air, cosmetics, diapers, food; Korea would be labeled an at-risk country and other nations would prohibit Koreans entry; U.S. businesses in country were already using the contaminated beef (Farivar, 2011; Jung, 2008)6. Even at the prep school where I taught administrators had to announce to students, parents and faculty that American beef was

5. Referenced by McNair and defined in Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary as “a property of chaotic systems (as the atmosphere) by which small changes in initial conditions can lead to large-scale and unpredictable variation in the future state of the system.”6. For certain McNair would include this type of rumor-mongering as one of the challenges to “quality”—as he wrote, “Of the millions of bloggers active at any given time, only a few hundred become credible….The rest comprise a communicative Tower of babel, fleeting and insubstantial, perhaps mischievous, sometimes dangerous” (pg. 205). Dangerous, absolutely, in this case.

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not being used in school meals. The news spread like chaotic wildfire, and led to the social action that McNair defined as the third stage of communicative multi-causality (production and consumption coming first, respectively); though resultant social action is unpredictable the netizens who fed these rumors into cyberspace surely hoped for, and got, action (McNair, 2006). Tens of thousands of concerned citizens took to the streets, peacefully at first, with staged candlelight demonstrations, but as the gossip and misinformation turned to urban myth and assumed fact, and as the government appeared unwilling to remove beef from the FTA table (President Lee said his government was “baffled by the spread of unfounded rumors about mad cow disease”), protests grew into the hundreds of thousands, disrupting the goings-on at the city’s center, and, consequently, prompting the police to use force (Choi, 2008; CNN). Hundreds of police officers and citizens were injured in the resulting melees (Choe, 2008). Lending to the pessimistic aspect of chaos’s accessibility and inter(activity) (more people having access to information and the ability to interact with that information), even testimonies by scientists that debunked the rampant rumors were ignored, drowned out by the buzz of fear and paranoia (Cho, 2008). Meanwhile, other factions utilized the large demonstrations to express their overall dissatisfaction with the newly elected President Lee or educational policies, or any number of conservative ideologies—the fluidity of protestation facilitated fringe group involvement (Kirk, 2008). The government found itself in a conundrum as the rumors took over; the people rose to demand change or else, and any further crackdown would trigger memories of previous crackdowns during the fight for democracy under military dictatorships in the 1980s. Hamstrung, the government renegotiated the FTA to preclude any beef from cattle more than 30 months old (older cows are said to have a higher likelihood of carrying the disease)—this was similar to agreements with Taiwan and Japan (Farivar, 2011). Protests abated. But the government was not simply moving along—some control measure had to be put in place. In July it announced measures to reduce “illegal or slanderous online material” by expanding an “identity verification system” it had implemented a year before requiring sites with more than 300,000 daily visitors to allow comments only by individuals

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whom registered with their residence registration numbers thereby curbing anonymous commentary. The new restriction would require any site with 100,000 daily visitors to abide by the restriction. (JoongAng Ilbo, 2008). In October the government finally used the Electronic Communication Fundamental Law to prosecute two people who created and circulated online rumors that riot police officers had killed a female demonstrator, and had sexually assaulted another during the protests. Both were convicted (Choi, 2009). When Japan’s Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant experienced a meltdown on March 11, 2011, New Media in South Korea (and worldwide) took to the keyboards to pump as much (mis)information as possible into cyberspace and beyond. A March 17 editorial in the Korea JoongAng Daily titled “To Catch a Lie” framed the situation:

Groundless rumors are again spreading around Korea in the wake of the cataclysmic earthquake and tsunami in Japan. Mobile phone text messages and Twitter messages warned that radioactive material from the nuclear facility in Japan would reach South Korea soon.

One such message read: “The No. 2 nuclear reactor at the Fukushima power plant has exploded, and the direction of the wind has also changed toward Korea. Stay indoors as long as possible.”

The government was fuming and the police sought out the culprit who was “the source of a false radiation warning that spread nationwide through text messages and social networking Web sites,” and could “depending on the purpose (of the source who) sent this kind of message,…be a subject of criminal punishment,” according to Seo Hyun-soo, chief of the police’s Cyber Terror Response Center (Yonhap, 2011). The perpetrator would be charged under the aforementioned Electronic Communication Fundamental Law. Meanwhile traditional media tried to separate the wheat from the chafe. In the nation’s largest newspaper, a detailed explanation of radiation

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dangers titled “Is Korea Safe from Japan Radiation?” included the following assessment:

The Korea Meteorological Administration recently conducted a simulation that looked into what would happen if a major radiation leakage occurred at the Japanese power station. The KMA said there is only a slim chance that radioactive materials like strontium, cesium and iodine would be carried by winds all the way over to Korea. (Chosun Ilbo, 2011)

It was as if potential chaos—that of a cloud filled with radioactivity—was being willed to the peninsula by panicked individuals positioned in front of computer screens around the nation. The negative, destructive aspect of chaos that McNair refers to was at play, and the frightened and vulnerable populous didn’t know what to believe. In my prep school classes we discussed the misinformation after several students said they or their mother had received a text message or read a blog post about the approaching radiation that would fall within the forecast rain and contaminate anything it touched. One girl said her mother insisted she could not go out, even to school. In fact, more than 100 schools closed in the Seoul area despite assurances from the Korea Institute of Nuclear Safety that only “miniscule amounts” of radiation had been detected, and from the Korea Meteorological Administration that it would be “difficult for the air over Fukushima to directly transfer to the Korean Peninsula” given the easterly flow of the jet stream (Kim, 2011). Facts no longer mattered within the info anarchy, and the government couldn’t control the narrative as people bought supplies in a panic. Yet as no one’s skin reddened and the scientific monitoring stations detected trace radiation (most of it from China), people calmed and returned to everyday life. The duped and naïve, in my experience, shrugged off their behavior by claiming the obvious: Well, it’s a good thing it didn’t happen.

Two Men, One Government and the Internet

As the Global Financial Crises swept across the planet in 2008, an unemployed 31-year-old Korean man with no formal economic education,

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sat at his home computer each evening posting economic assessments and forecasts about South Korea on the popular Daum Agora forum; still hoping to earn a four-year degree in economics, he studied for the university entrance exam each day at a local university library (Schwartz, 2009). The man, just another anonymous user, (though he submitted his national ID and phone numbers when setting up the Daum account) had decided to call himself Minerva after the Roman goddess of wisdom and went about spreading that wisdom, however dire it may have been. Following the collapse of Lehman Brothers in mid-September, which he’d predicted, his star rose rapidly, and people began to wonder who this economic seer was and how he possessed such knowledge (Choe, 2009a). Headlines like “Minerva: Economy’s mystery seer” began to fill media reports with much of the same content as the following:

The faceless prophet has written over 200 analyses and predictions…Some even call him the “Internet economy president,” and large groups of people online now hang on his every word. Some even suggested ousting the nation’s top economist, Finance Minister Kang Man-soo, and replacing him with Minerva. (Lee, H., 2008)

The invisible prophet continued to churn out punditry under anonymity while revealing minor details about his “background” as a former Wall Street broker with a master’s degree from overseas, both lies (Choe, 2009b). As the economy worsened, Minerva’s popularity increased and with more notoriety came the danger that he would be exposed, an exposure that would surely reveal his lack of education in a country where education means everything, especially if you’re making authoritative predictions.

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In October, Minerva received a call from Daum asking if he’d like to speak with a reporter. He hung up in alarm—no one knew his secret—remembering that Daum had his registration information. Had he been exposed? A month later the government asked Minerva to step forward. He didn’t, and, consequently, the attorney general announced an investigation into his identity (Schwartz, 2009). The government made it appear as if its hand had been forced. Then, according to prosecutors, on Dec. 29 Minerva made another post stating that Korean authorities sent “an emergency order to seven major financial institutions and major exporting companies to stop U.S. dollar purchases beginning at 2:30 p.m.” in order to stabilize the Korean currency (Park & Jung, 2009). The local currency market went berserk as chaos—caused by Minerva—took over. The government denied any emergency order. A few days later, as he was getting ready to go out with friends, a knock came at the door behind which stood four plainclothes investigators ready to serve a search warrant (Schwartz, 2009). The jig was up for Park Dae-sung. The government had had enough. “There was no complaint filed against Park, but it was certain that he spread false rumors, so we launched our own investigation,” said a senior prosecutor in charge of the investigation (Park & Jung, 2009). Recognize the usage of “false rumors”? The lingo of the Electronic Communication Fundamental Law under which he would be prosecuted. The butterfly’s wings had been clipped. Interestingly, it seems Park would’ve stopped blogging altogether without

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his arrest. Fear had overtaken him and he’d posted a farewell message on Daum a day before the knock on his door (Schwartz, 2009). Still the government needed to set an example by bringing him to trial even though just revealing his true identity to the Korean public would have been enough. At his January indictment prosecutors said Park had “harmed the public interest by spreading allegedly false information while being aware that he was a highly recognized figure in cyberspace” and that he caused “intangible losses”—such as a weakened sovereign rating —as well as “tangible losses in the country’s foreign currency market” (Ser, 2009). From January until his April trial he was held in the Seoul Detention Center and interrogated. As his trial opened, so did the closet where his true identity hanged (that of an unemployed dilettante), thereby sending Minerva’s prophet status into the gutter. Prosecutors pressed for an 18 month prison sentence but after one expert testifying on Park’s behalf (a prominent Korean economics professor and former presidential advisor) said that Park was a better teacher than he and that even he “was surprised about his lack of a formal economics background,” the judge agreed, declaring that even if some of the posts were inaccurate, Park strongly believed them. He was acquitted. Nevertheless, the government’s desire to put a lid on Minerva’s chaos succeeded, and as he said following his acquittal, “I regret what I did…I don’t think I’ll ever blog again, not in South Korea” (Choe, 2009b). The government moved on a second case when, in early January of 2012, prosecutors detained 23-year-old Twitter user, Park Jung-geun, for reposting messages from the North Korean government’s Twitter account claiming that he violated the NSL. The account, Uriminzokkiri.com, is often quoted in South Korean media, and known as a source of propaganda (Ser & Lee, 2012). According to reports, this was the first time that anyone has been prosecuted for retweeting North Korean propaganda, and the prosecutors say that over two years, Park retweeted 96 postings from the Uriminzokkiri account and posted 34 pro-North messages; All of the retweets praised Pyongyang, and Park’s own tweets included arguments that were deemed NSL violations, and could land him with seven years in prison (Ser & Lee, 2012). Park also uploaded an image (see below) on which he’d superimposed his sad face as that of a North Korean soldier, and replaced

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Ten months after his arrest, Park received a suspended 10 month prison sentence for violating Article 7 of the NSL; though the judge admitted some of the posts contained parody, he said Park’s overall actions were equivalent to “supporting and joining forces with an antistate entity,” a clear reference to NSL rhetoric (Choe 2012b). Not long after Park’s detainment and the news of his story, Amnesty International took notice and started to look into the facts of the case as it related to the overall use of the NSL to limit freedom of expression. Speaking with Park after the sentencing they found the process itself had done enough damage:

[He] says the whole process has left him physically and mentally exhausted, he has difficulty sleeping, suffers from nerves and is seeking treatment for stress. “Even though I disagree with North Korean communism, I’m interested in North Korean culture...I have a right to know about it, to express my freedom.” Park Jeong-geun feels that as a target of an NSL investigation “my brain belongs to the state. (Amnesty International)

Just as with Park Dae-sung in the Minerva case, the state’s efforts to use coercive and regulatory measures to control the chaos of New Media (online forums and Twitter in the two Park’s cases) that has destabilizing potential, incorporated the traditional state tools—the police and prosecution—to upend the lives of those considered threats. The difference here, I believe, is that two decades ago and beyond, the judges would have thrown away the key, if either man ever lived to see a trial. Back in the first year of its enactment, the NSL “was used to arrest or imprison 188,621 people. Almost a decade later, opposition Social Democrat presidential candidate Cho Bong Ahm was sentenced to death and executed the following year” (Kraft, 2012). Times have changed with democratization which could be seen as the sort of evolutionism that Pieterse mentions in reference to globalization.7

7. Pg. 51

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Conclusion: Good and Bad Chaos—Who Knows Best?

In his preface, McNair proposes the “chaos paradigm” and the “possibilities allowed by an emerging cultural chaos for dissent, openness and diversity rather than closure, exclusivity and ideological homogeneity.” With this he advances a “pragmatic cultural optimism,” the theory that things have changed for the better with info anarchy, inter(activity), accessibility et al. As this chaos encircles the planet fueled by technology, Korea stands as a testing ground, a microcosm of the future given its rapid adoption of cutting edge technological tools that allow the citizenry instantaneous access to the shifting and evolving virtual public sphere, a place where the consequences of chaos gestate before often spilling out into the world beyond screens, the “real” world (for now, before augmented reality) where people live and die, suffer and succeed. As states struggle to control this brazen and unpredictable new technological age, the definition and implications of “free” speech and press for New Media are central concerns. For Amnesty International and McNair to implore that nations permit all manner of info anarchy, of rumors and hoaxes, of fear-mongering and panic-inducing posts, seems rather absurd if one sits as the leader in Seoul or Beijing or New Delhi or Brasilia. If, as happened in Seoul in 2008, rumors incite mass protests where hundreds of thousands of people (or millions in the case of China or India) fill the streets disrupting social order, then the concept of cultural optimism falls flat on its face. There must be a mid-point between control and chaos for states to maintain the order necessary for the stability of society, and this will be relative to the social norms, the assemblage8 of each nation, the cultural differentialism9 at play, and the idiosyncrasies of the society. For now, in our current stage of globalization, beyond those of Antiquity, the Middle Ages and Modernity, the nation state provides the stability by which the peoples of the world may construct their lives, with, for the most part, some sense of comfort. To optimistically insist that the faucet should first be opened wide and then, later, we’ll see what results, operates on the assumption that good will trump bad, that humans with handleless technological10 tools shall strive predominantly for the ultimate evolution of mankind, and that utopia and the reality of cyber-utopianism11 are not far from our reach. The naïveté of this thinking is self-evident.

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The great challenge, as Korea has shown, exists at the point of excessive application of laws, old and new, to persecute potential threats. Here, as the above cases have shown, the judiciary seems to have provided the proper checks and balances. Nonetheless, by the time arrests have been made and lives upended by the litigation process, much of the damage has been done to individuals’ reputations in a society where it’s hard to reinvent oneself. Therefore, more needs to be done at the front end with the thorough evaluation of threats, and their potential and actual effects. As with Minerva, a simple call or instant message might have sufficed. In the case of Park Jung-geun, some sense of satire and humor might have helped, yet it must be noted that the last North Korean attack had occurred less than two years before. Again, maybe a simple discussion without detainment would have straightened the situation out, and provided both sides with some clarity. Above all, what I think I’ve discovered during this report is that perhaps the inter(activity) that McNair outlined could be applied to the state and the citizen to facilitate better understanding in this chaotic new world, to avoid the kind of excessive application of laws that occurred in the cases of the two Parks, and overall, to control the chaos much like the metropolis of Seoul on any given day.

8. Wise says “the assemblage is not just a person and his or her things but the relation among all these things, the qualities of these things, their meanings and ideas, habits and rhythms” (pg. 19).9. Pieterse writes, “Both nationalism and race thinking bear the stamp of cultural differentialism, one emphasizing territory and language, and the other biology as destiny.” 10. Evgeny Morozov mentions this in The Net Delusion (2011), referencing Langdon Winner who said, “Although virtually limitless in their power, our technologies are tools without handles” (pg. 31).11. Morozov refers to this as “a quasi-religious belief in the power of the Internet to do supernatural things, from eradicating illiteracy in Africa to organizing all of the world’s information...” (pg. 19).

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