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Veteran Member
Join Date: Oct 2001
Location: WV
Posts: 4,369
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Great article.
http://www.zmag.org/content/showarti...21&ItemID=3586
Quote:
In a recent article in The New York Times, Howard French reports of South Korea:
"For years, people will be debating what made this country go from conservative to liberal, from gerontocracy to youth culture and from staunchly pro-American to a deeply ambivalent ally - all seemingly overnight... But for many observers, the most important agent of change has been the Internet." (French, 'Online Newspaper Shakes Up Korean Politics', The New York Times, March 6, 2003)
South Korea is "wired" - it has fast broadband connections in fully 70 percent of all households. "The internet is so important here," a Western diplomat in Seoul says. "This is the most online country in the world. The younger generation get all their information from the web. Some don't even bother with TVs. They just download the programmes." (Jonathan Watts, 'World's first internet president logs on: Web already shaping policy of new South Korean leader', The Guardian, February 24, 2003)
As elections approached in South Korea last year, more and more people began to get their information and political analysis from internet news services instead of from the country's overwhelmingly conservative newspapers. The most influential internet service, OhmyNews, registered 20 million page views per day around election time last December. In March, the service still averaged around 14 million visits daily, in a country of 40 million people. OhmyNews was started three years ago by Oh Yeon Ho, 38, who says:
"My goal was to say farewell to 20th-century Korean journalism, with the concept that every citizen is a reporter... The professional news culture has eroded our journalism, and I have always wanted to revitalize it. Since I had no money, I decided to use the Internet, which has made this guerrilla strategy possible."
French explains the strategy:
"Although the staff has grown to 41, from the beginning the electronic newspaper's unusual concept has been to rely mostly on contributions from ordinary readers all over the country, who send dispatches about everything from local happenings and personal musings to national politics."
Something comparable happened spontaneously to Media Lens on a much smaller scale during the Iraq crisis - thousands of readers began posting and reading the best and most current reporting on the crisis, together with their views and local experiences, on the Media Lens message board. As a result, readers have often been able to access accurate versions of a story before it appears in the mainstream media, so effectively neutralising much mainstream propaganda. When they see a story reported by the media, it is now reflexive for many readers to check what they have read and seen on the internet - which often reveals key details and perspectives omitted by the mainstream. For example, the famous toppling of the statue of Saddam Hussein in Baghdad on April 9 appeared to us, from watching BBC and ITN news, to have been cheered by enormous crowds - we quickly learned that this was not the case from our own message board.
Relying almost solely on ordinary readers in this way, OhmyNews helped generate a huge national movement that resulted in the election of Roh Moo Hyun, a reformist lawyer, last December. Before OhmyNews got involved, the new president had been a relative unknown. After his election, he granted OhmyNews the first interview he gave to any Korean news organization. "Netizens won," Oh says of the election. "Traditional media lost." (Mark L. Clifford and Moon Ihlwan, 'Korea: The Politics of Peril', Business Week, February 24, 2003)
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05-04-2003, 10:24 PM
