Korea’s new generation of ’Web 2.0’ protesters
By Choe Sang-Hun International Herald Tribune
Tuesday, June 17, 2008

In 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.


"We cannot trust mainstream media reports on mad cow disease, so we’re taking matters into our own hands," said Suh Dong Ho, 32, a photographer who helped organize a group of 160 "citizen reporters."


Kim Joo Hyung, Suh’s 15-year-old colleague, said: "What we do is faster and more real than the ordinary news media."


As the rallies grew, the traditional organizers of antigovernment demonstrations - civic groups, labor unions and opposition parties - joined the fray. They distributed candles, coffee, snacks and antigovernment placards but appeared to take back seats, having never led such a disparate crowd. Members from Agora and other online communities joined the rallies carrying their own flags. One such group consisted of young women whose common ground was a liking for miniskirts.


Dozens of Web sites have been offering live broadcasts of the demonstrations. Some hired BJs - "broadcast jockeys" - to enliven the action.


"We demonstrators are like cockroaches," Choi Han Wook, a broadcast jockey at 615TV, a progressive Internet Web site, said on-air from a makeshift broadcasting center at Seoul City Plaza. "We never disappear. We keep crawling out. We are a scourge to Lee Myung Bak."


Local pundits dubbed the phenomenon variously as "street democracy," "digital populism" or "Web 2.0 protest."


Whatever it was, Lee was clearly the victim. Last week, his entire cabinet offered to resign.


In a sense, Lee is struggling with a legacy of South Korean history. Even decades after the end of military rule, the public’s mistrust of authority runs so deep that many still consider street demonstrations the best way to make their voices heard.


The fact that most major political upheavals in recent years - bringing down the dictatorship, effecting democratic reforms - came at times of popular uprisings has given South Korean citizens an unusually strong sense that they are in charge, not the president or Parliament.


When South Koreans felt their pride wounded by Lee’s beef deal and his leadership style, they decided to snub him. "Mad cow" became the adjective for a blizzard of complaints against Lee’s government: "mad cow education," "mad cow labor policy" and "mad cow health care."


Young protesters who felt their president was out of touch sarcastically called Lee "2MB" - a hopelessly slow computer processor speed of two megabytes - which coincides with Lee Myung Bak’s initials. ("Two" is pronounced "Lee" in Korean.)


"Shut up! Just do as we say and renegotiate the beef deal!" read one common poster summarizing the protesters’ attitude toward Lee.


(On Monday, officials said that talks in Washington on revising the beef deal had broken off. But hours later, the government said the talks would resume.)


In South Korea, street demonstrations have always been a mix of festivity and violence. The rallies that have taken place over the past month come with music and dance troupes.


But some frown on the mob mentality the Internet can foster. "In the online discussions on beef, you are welcome only if you voice a certain opinion, and you’re attacked if you represent an opposing view," said Kim, the political scientist. "I doubt the debate is rational."


One scientifically unproven claim that circulated on the Internet was that Koreans have a gene that make them especially susceptible to mad cow disease.


During the Saturday rally, a high school girl took the microphone and said before the crowd: "I drove four hours to join this rally because I don’t want to die."


Choi See Joong, chairman of the Broadcasting and Communications Commission, said the government had no immediate plans to intervene to stop what critics called false information on the Internet.


"For me, this is a hot potato," said Choi, a close confidant of Lee. "For now, when I watch the candlelight protests, I try not to see its political meanings. Instead, I try to see the positive side of young people’s passion on the Internet."