The Internet and the Public in South Korea: Online Political Talk and Culture
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View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk brought to you by CORE provided by Illinois Digital Environment for Access to Learning and Scholarship Repository THE INTERNET AND THE PUBLIC IN SOUTH KOREA: ONLINE POLITICAL TALK AND CULTURE BY JEONG-HO KIM DISSERTATION Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Communications in the Graduate College of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2012 Urbana, Illinois Doctoral Committee: Professor John Nerone, Chair Professor Clifford Christians Professor Nancy Abelmann Professor Andrew Pickering, University of Exeter Abstract This dissertation is an ethnographic study of online political talk and its culture in South Korea. In this study, I examine the action and culture of online-talk participants from the insider‘s perspective. My main argument is that online political talk has given rise to the subjectivity that characterizes a new type of the public, which I name the simin public. I use simin as the term to refer to a South Korean conception of citizenship. In demonstrating the rise of a subjectivity of the simin public, I first identify and characterize a central practice of online-talk participants: a social role that I term citizen polemicism. This role refers to a set of actions of judging public matters, offering such judgments in public, and arguing with fellow citizens. Then, I investigate what moves quite a few citizens to engage in citizen polemicism and why the voice of the citizen polemicist is considered to be a legitimate public voice. In answering the former question, I argue that citizen polemicists are morally motivated public communicators. In inquiring into the latter question, I claim that the legitimacy of the citizen polemicist‘s voice depends on the voice‘s embededness in open, critical, and common sense-oriented discussion. Lastly, I identify a main culture—which I call the culture of thininking together in public—that frames online political talk in general, which centers on the interactions between the citizen polemicist and its audience, but is not reduced to them. In this culture, online-talk participants are willing to think together about public matters in a public place and in a critical manner. The thinking-together-in-public culture leads online-talk participants to form shared understandings and judgments about public matters and further to produce collective political discourses. This dissertation explores two additional research issues: how the Internet has contributed to the rise of the simin public and how individual citizens are transformed into members of the simin public. In examining the former issue, I argue that the Internet not only provides ordinary citizens with new opportunities for and new abilities of political communication, but also shapes and nurtures specific types of communicative actions, new desires and interests with regard to political communication, and online-talk participants‘ understandings of their communicative actions and themselves. In investigating the latter issue, I emphasize the importance of political imagination—exemplified by the role of simin in the rise of the simin public—which builds upon an association between the social and communication technology. ii Table of Contents Chapter 1: Introduction……………………………………………………………………………………………………….1 Chapter 2: Three Models of the Public: John Dewey, Hannah Arendt, and Jürgen Habermas…..39 Chapter 3: Communication Power without Authority and Political Communication without Power: The South Korean Context of Online Political Talk……………………………………………72 Chapter 4: Citizen Polemicism in South Korea: The Internet and a New Social Role in Public Communication……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….99 Chapter 5: Citizen Polemicism as an Avocation: Passion, Self-Presentation, and Civic Mission…………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………126 Chapter 6: Bringing Common Sense to Politics: The Citizen Polemicist’s Voice and its Legitimacy……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………..164 Chapter 7: Thinking Together in Public: A Culture of Online-Talk Participants…………………….196 Chapter 8: Conclusion…………………………………………………………………………………………………….232 References………….………………………………………………………………………………………………………248 iii Chapter 1 Introduction On April 17, 2008, President Lee Myung-bak of South Korea—who was inaugurated in February 2008—decided to re-open a South Korean market to American beef. The South Korean government banned imports of American beef in 2003 after a case of mad cow disease was found in America. Even though the government eased the ban in 2006, it allowed imports only of meat from cows younger than thirty months except for bones and other materials that were suspected of carrying the disease. But Lee decided to ease most of these restrictions on the eve of his summit with President George W. Bush in Washington, D.C. He hoped that his decision would contribute to improving relations with the Bush administration and to encouraging the United States Congress to ratify a free trade agreement that the two governments reached in April, 2007 (Choe, 2008). In the process of making a decision to resume American beef imports, however, Lee and his administration did not make any efforts to sound out public opinion or to seek South Korean citizens‘ understanding. The deal that the South Korean government agreed to, moreover, had less rigorous safeguards against the dangers of mad cow disease than the deals that the American government had reached with other countries. President Lee‘s decision to lift a five-year ban on imports of American beef infuriated many South Korean people. Public opinion surveys showed that a majority of South Koreans opposed this decision. Tens of thousands of people began to hold candlelit vigils in Seoul, protesting against American beef imports. It was not long before these vigils spread to other cities and the number of their participants expanded to hundreds of thousands of people. President Lee and his administration were bewildered by these unexpected mass demonstrations. In reacting to the protests, on the one hand, they took back their initial position on the beef issue. Lee sent government officials to Washington, D.C., in order to ask the American government to prevent exports of beef from cattle aged thirty months or more; he apologized on national television for failing to communicate with people; and the entire cabinet, the prime minister, and all the top aides to Lee submitted their resignations. On the other hand, the South Korean government used the police force. Police dispersed the protesters with water canons and arrested them. The candlelit vigils, nevertheless, continued to take place on a near daily-basis for more than four months. 1 One of the most conspicuous characteristics of these candlelit demonstrations was the diversity and heterogeneity of its participants. They, many news reports said, consisted of demographically different types of people: for example, mothers carrying babies in prams, middle- and high-school students in their uniforms, career women wearing high heels, businessmen wearing suits and ties, parents holding hands with their children, young couples, Buddhist monks, catholic nuns, college students, blue-collar workers, white-collar workers, pensioners, and small business owners. According to news media, they also had a wide range of different grievances against President Lee‘s decision to resume American beef imports. Some demonstrators had fears of mad cow disease. Others disliked Lee‘s authoritarian style of leadership. Others had national sentiment, criticizing Lee for making too many concessions to the United States. Still others opposed a free trade agreement and new liberalism. The beef protesters were thus heterogeneous except for the fact that Lee‘s decision triggered their taking to the streets. The New York Times reported that it was difficult to identify the main force behind the candlelit vigils in South Korea (Choe, 2008). It is not surprising if one considers the diversity and heterogeneity of the demonstrators. In fact, many reports said that there were no major organizers of the candlelit demonstrations. On July 4, 2008, Amnesty International dispatched its investigator, Norma Kang Muico, to South Korea to look into the police‘s human right violations against the beef protesters. After she conducted a two-week-long investigation, she said in her interview with the Korean vernacular newspaper Hankyoreh:1 It‘s a wonderful expression of people power, at the most organic level. It just grows on its own. It doesn‘t have leadership. It doesn‘t have specific political groups leading it: [for example] trade unions, university students, or normal [and] traditional leaders of any protests. [It‘s] very peaceful demonstration. It‘s remarkable to see so many different types of people. All ages, backgrounds, [and] gender[s] are represented at the vigil. I think that way it‘s quite nice to see it. (Heo & Muico, 2008) In addition to the diversity and heterogeneity of the demonstrators, as she observed, the non- existence of leading organizations was another characteristic of the beef demonstrations. 1 According to the Hankyure Shinmun, she was born in South Korea and lived there for twenty-one years until she left the country. In recent years, as an investigator of Amnesty International, she has visited South Korea every year to check the state of human rights in the country. 2 Even though most beef protesters were not members of any movement groups,