A Case of National Character Set Standards Controversy in Korea
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This thesis has been submitted in fulfilment of the requirements for a postgraduate degree (e.g. PhD, MPhil, DClinPsychol) at the University of Edinburgh. Please note the following terms and conditions of use: • This work is protected by copyright and other intellectual property rights, which are retained by the thesis author, unless otherwise stated. • A copy can be downloaded for personal non-commercial research or study, without prior permission or charge. • This thesis cannot be reproduced or quoted extensively from without first obtaining permission in writing from the author. • The content must not be changed in any way or sold commercially in any format or medium without the formal permission of the author. • When referring to this work, full bibliographic details including the author, title, awarding institution and date of the thesis must be given. The Social Shaping of ICTs Standards : A Case of National Coded Character Set Standards Controversy in Korea Jinsang Hwcmg PhD The University of Edinburgh 2005 For Hayeon JJI Acknowledgements I would like to express my sincere respect and gratitude to my principal super visor, Prof. Robin Williams, not only for his clear and thoughtful guidance, but also for his constant support and encouragement. I am espedally thankful for his patience regarding the completion of this thesis. I would a]so like to thank my second supervisor, Dr. Rob Procter, for his invaluable insight and inteJlectual stimulation. I am grateful to Dr. Ian Graham at University of Edinburgh and Dr. Ulrik J0rgensen at Technical University of Denmark for agreeing, at short notice, to be my internal and external examiners respectively and for taking the time to read my thesis and make valuable suggestions. My gratitude is extended to other faculty members, administrative staff and postgraduates at the Science Studies Unit, the Department of Sociology and the Research Centre for Social Sciences, who have provided me with a friendly so cial and academic atmosphere over the years. I also would like to thank my Korean friends in Edinburgh - Hee-Cheol Yoon, Won-Hee Yoon, Eun-Mi Park, Hee-Kyung Choi, Sang-Hyun Kim, Hun-Jin Kim, Ki-Heung Kim and many oth ers - for their friendship, understanding, and guidance. For interviews and cor respondence, I thank all the interviewees for their time and generosity. I owe enormous debt of gratitude to my parents and parents-in-law for their love and support throughout my life, in particuJar, in difficult times. My special thanks are also due to my family, Yeon-Sang, Kyung-Sook, and Da-Yeon. Last but not least, I would like to express my deepest gratitude to my wife, Haycon Cho for her continued love, support, encouragement and patience. Without her, this thesis would not have seen the light of day. IV Abstract This thesis examines the historical array of 'social' and 'technical' factors thC1t h<lve shaped the development and evolution of Korean national Coded Character Set (CCS) standards. CCS standards refer to a layer of compatibility standards which specify rules for digital representation of textual data at the most basic level of Information mid Com munication Technologies (ICTs). The effective and efficient operation of information processing, storage, and exchange is thus dependent on the employment of tcchnicC11ly sound, economically viable, and culturally adequate CCS standards at national, regional and international levels. Historicaily, the CCS standards had emerged <lround the cultural presumptions and practices of the US and Western Europe due to the economic and tcchniclll dominance of the region from the formative stage of ICTs development. As the need for global infor mation infrastructure and multilingual information processing has been growing, how ever, the international CCS standards regime has evolved (from 1SO 646, to ISO 2022, and JSO/IEC 10646-1) to incorporate various national scripts around the world, and the issues have arisen over the adequate representation of these scripts within the interna tional standards regime. For example, the incorporation of East Asian scripts, such as Chinese, Japanese, and Korean, presents a formidable challenge with their exceptionlllly large repertoire. In particular, the design and implementation of Korean national CCS standards, nor mally a exclusive domain of experts and bureaucrats, had caused a series of heated pub lic controversies during the 1980s and 1990s. Despite the intensity of disputes cmd the breadth of participation in the controversies on Korean national CCS standards, the stan dardisation process had not been subject to a detailed sodo-cconomic llnalysis, lhc lllck of which allowed deterministic and simplistic speculations to appeJr, implying techno logical rationality, economic imperatives or corporate strategics alone have guided thl' CCS stClndards along a linear development path with increasingly larger and more pow erful standards replacing previous ones. Drawing on the social shaping of technology perspective, the case study examines the evolution of Korean national CCS standards, focusing both on the process in ·which a standards emerges as a result of network building activities and alliance~ form(1tion of various actors, and on the changes in immediate and broader contcxls Jround the standardisation which directly and indirectly affect the interests alliances and evolution of standards. Contrary to the deterministic and simplistic perspectives, the case study suggests a structured but also dynamic social shaping process of the Korean nlltional CCS standards. Four major themes forwarded in the case study are as below: First, the case identified a received view on the Korean controversy which can be characterised as 'technological fix on cultural problem' in a sense that technical ch<lllenge experienced in Korean character encoding was a product of distinctive local culture llnd Lhc problem was fixed by the steady advances in the information technology. With out denying the importance of the state of technological capabilities, however, the cz1se shows that social choices had been made both in international and national standards zind had critical roles in shaping various controversy and whole national slcmdards sd ting process. v Second, the case study identifies two contrasting modes of standardisation, 'tcchnici sation' and 'politicisation,' and examines how the fluctuation between them has affected the development of Korean national standards setting process. Jn the discourse of tcch niciscd standardisation, technological knowledge is accepted as neutral, asocial 'hllrd foct.' Accordingly, the social choices are obscured and the standardisation process is to be dominated by the negotiation among disinterested experts over the relative technical merits of standards. Under the politicised mode of standardisation,' the political nature of CCS sttmdards design - conflicting values and incongruent ascription of technological properties as a result - is brought forward. The standardisation is characterised by the formation of and competition among interests alliances. The outcome of stl!ndardisll tion seems to be dependent on which mode is dominant as well as who prevails in l'ach mode. Third, the case study raises a question about the relationship between the standards and interests embedded in them. The ascription of certain technological properties to standards and the interests alliances built around them proved unstable and dynamic. Both of them seem to be influenced by network building activities of llctors and their bJckdrop, a specific configuration of economic, social, cultural, political and technolog ical factors, enabling and constraining the activities of actors involved in the standard isation process. As the makeup of the configuration changes for various reasons, - for example, globalised software market, social movements, surge of nationalism, political democratisation, advances in related technological field - the meanings attached by the actors to the standard also shifts, and the interests alliances based on them are unmade and replaced by new ones, producing a series of character set standards. Fourth, the study also draws attention to the complexity involved in the nlltional standardisation process and the challenge faced by the social research into thosl' intri cate social shaping process. The standardisation process involved many <Ktors at dif ferent levels and across various geographical locales. Also there had been recurrent but unpredictabJe changes in the relationship among the actors and between the actors and artefacts. A recent trend in the social shaping approach - a call for a decentralised con cept of actor and the transforming terrain of innovation - was found hrlpful to meet the challenge. In particu]ar, the concept of 'development arena' was found useful to meet the challenge and to understand the case in ba]ance between the actions of different 'modes of performance' and the contexts of varying 'configurations' of heterogeneous clements. Contents Chapter 1 Introduction 1 1.1 Research on Coded character set Standards 1.2 Research Questions . 7 1.3 Structure of the Thesis 8 Chapter 2 Literature Review 14 2.1 Social Shaping of Technology 15 2.2 The Social Shaping of ICTs . 23 2.3 TCTs and Compatibility Standards 30 2.4 Conclusion ............. 36 Chapter 3 Methodology J7 3.1 Case study Design ...................... 38 3.2 The Case of National Character Set Standards Controversy 4J 3.3 Conclusion . .. 51 Chapter 4 Coded character set