Comments on: Dog Poop Girl makes WaPo

By: Investigating

Investigating — Mon, 31 Oct 2005 23:17:30 +0000

Investigating

“There is some background noise here ” said President Bush recently as special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald’s concluded investigation.

By: Won Joon Choe

Won Joon Choe — Mon, 11 Jul 2005 15:14:04 +0000

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.

By: The Marmots Hole WIR: Give and Take

The Marmots Hole WIR: Give and Take — Sun, 10 Jul 2005 07:28:43 +0000

[...] 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 [...]

By: bulgasari

bulgasari — Sat, 09 Jul 2005 10:54:17 +0000

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.