The Marmot’s Hole

Mark Russell was kind enough to quote me and the Big Ho in a recent news blurb in Newsweek about the blog block in Korea:

South Korea may be one of the most wired societies in the world, but some Koreans are beginning to wonder if Seoul is truly ready to embrace that status. Last Thursday a university student in the capital was fined for posting political parodies on the Internet. In 2003 some 18,000 Web sites were censored for crimes such as “undermining law and order.” And since late June, about 50 Web sites have been shut down for allegedly trying to post the video of the execution of South Korean hostage Kim Sun Il. Authorities have also blocked large Weblog services, cutting off thousands of blogs that did not offer the video. Officials claim the blanket ban is merely a technical matter: although they could shut down Korean sites, they couldn’t be as targeted with foreign blogs. Bloggers, though, worry that average Koreans are coming to accept infringements on the free flow of information as normal. Kevin Kim complains on his site, Big Hominoid, that Korea “has not come far out of the shadow of its military dictatorship past.” While that may be extreme, Robert Koehler, whose blog, the Marmot’s Hole, is one of the most popular English-language sites about Korea, says, “there seems to be this idea among Korean Netizens that the Net [is] a forum for expressing the power of nationalism.” Trying to help the country’s reputation, though, may only end up hurting it.

Just to explain the context of that statement, I did point out that not all Korean Netizens behaved thusly — Korean cyberspace (or society at large, for that matter) isn’t a hive, after all. But a significant number do, egged on by certain portal sites and an MIC that looks the other way.