The Washington Post’s Jonathan Krim contributed a piece today on subways, dog poop, blogs and the controversy over Internet privacy:
If you no longer marvel at the Internet’s power to connect and transform the world, you need to hear the story of a woman known to many around the globe as, loosely translated, Dog Poop Girl.
Recently, the woman was on the subway in her native South Korea when her dog decided that this was a good place to do its business.
The woman made no move to clean up the mess, and several fellow travelers got agitated. The woman allegedly grew belligerent in response.
What happened next was a remarkable show of Internet force, and a peek into an unsettling corner of the future.
Blogger Don Park, who was quoted in the piece, posted about the Netizen assault on Dog Poop Girl back on June 8 — read it as well as the 140 comments. Mr. Park was also kind enough to link to some other blogger commentary (much of it cited in the WaPo) regarding the incident. Some thought-provoking stuff.
The Chosun Ilbo also ran a piece on Dog Poop Girl today, much of it based on the WaPo story. Robert Neff offered his own thoughts on the incident here at the Marmot’s Hole.
4 Comments
This became ‘news’ for the Wapo because several US-based bloggers decided to blog on its significance in the global arena. However, none of them have looked at the fact that this is essentially a Korean phenomenom. Does the Star Wars kid really compare to a girl who has had thousands of people condemn her and ask for (and it appears, receive) information about her family, or a guy who has been forced to quit his job due to his harrassment for his (alleged) responsibilty for his girlfriend’s suicide?
While I do think it’s worthwhile to look at the internet culture of a nation with the highest broadband penetration in world (in the hope of perceiving future trends in the internet culture of other countries) you’d have to notice that you don’t see thousands of people vowing to seek revenge on a guy who parked illegally in Denver, Colorado. 3 out of 5 of the blog posts that Don Park linked to (here) are essentially posts referring to other second-hand blog posts, or ‘amplifying loops,’ as they’ve been called elsewhere (not dismiss them; they’re well worth reading). However, this so-called ‘cyber terror’ that occurs in Korean cyberspace is a reflection of Korean culture, not of global internet culture; this has not been acknowledged in the Wapo article, which looks only at the opinions of American bloggers.
[...] oman) and her unwillingness to take care of what her dog had given the floor of the subway made the news in the States, raising concerns of a Big Brother made up of the [...]
Bulgsari,
I can’t have said it better, and once again foreign observers have misconstrued local phonomena. The cyber-lynching of this girl is a reflection of South Korea’s rabidly communitarian culture or at least a reflection of its residue.
Investigating
“There is some background noise here ” said President Bush recently as special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald’s concluded investigation.