Personally, I thought it was a great class, but the real proof is in the pudding. And though the students drafted the majority of the final exam — with excellent, excellent questions — the final question was mine.

There’s a big smile on my face as I read the answers to that question: “What is the most important thing you learned this semester in our class on Media?”

So far, a few students have argued the most important thing is that they learned how powerful media is in today’s world, that it is a language that needs to be learned and understood. But one student really got me in that chunk of the brain that drives me to teach. She wrote (I paraphrase slightly), “I learned that I have some power in every situation. I can criticize something, or think about it, and that is power. Even not saying something can sometimes be a kind of power. Power is not just something that politicians or famous people have. I have power. It shocked me, and it’s amazing.”

This was something I hammered away at a few times, of course. I used the (dangerous) example of the class itself. “In this classroom, who has power?” The students, like any sane person would say, argued I did. Then I said, “Well, if one of you stood up and walked out, can I stop you? And if you all stood up together and said, ‘This is too much homework!’ could I argue with you?” They agreed, they had some power, but I had power over their grades. And then I smiled and said, “And you have power over my teacher rankings! But anyway, besides grades, what power do I have? If you really want to resist me, you can sacrifice your grades. And I can’t give everyone F, right? If you work together…”

Ha, I don’t expect a riot on campus next semester, of course. I also noted the fact that if they banded together ridiculously, I really could give them all Fs.

Another student told me about the experience of asking some other foreign teacher of hers to please not talk so much during final exams. (He did so during the midterm and she was worried he’d talk all through the finals as well.) The teacher apparently acted all miffed about it, she said, when talked to him, and she asked me what to do because she pretty much felt smashed-down by his response, which was relatively angry.

I told her I didn’t know the guy and whether he was mature or competent, but to give him a little time, and then try to make sure he understood she respected him, but just needed quiet during exams. (Not an unreasonable request.) Well, last night at a dinner with some students, she told me that during the final exam, uncharacteristically, the teacher was silent throughout the exam. “Then I realized what you said… I always have some power, in every relationship, if I can find it. If I am brave.”

Not quite Foucauldian analysis of intersubjectivity of power — thank goodness, I think the jargon alone would kill my students! — but it certainly is a step up from never having thought about it before, innit?

Pardon me, I’m just a little pleased at finding that perhaps I’m doing something right in the classroom.

(And now, for next semester, to work on creating an environment where everyone feels just that little bit more supported, so they are all more willing to speak up and contribute… it’s tough because I’m just a bit intimidating. What did one student say? “You seem like scary guy, like bastard…” [my word of the night last night] “… but you’re very generous and kind inside, secretly.”) I think that’s what was said.

Shall I let me inner kindness show a bit, then? We’ll see how it works for me next semester…

One more tiny note: I’ve found it is possible to get a little tough jargon into the class, if it becomes a focal thing. If you hammer away at it. For this semester, we had three such words:

• power
• mediated/hypermediated experience
• hyperdetermined image

These were pretty much enough for a whole semester, as we kept returning back to these concepts every few weeks to see how they applied to whatever we were looking at or listening to.

One of the “few others” I met was a guy I recognized, but couldn’t place where I recognized him from until someone mentioned Youtube. He’s that guy who posts videos from his daily life in Korea.

Anyway, now he’s posted a video that (briefly) has me in it, too. Do I really sound like that? And look like that? Eh?

Came home to a missed chat message from overseas, from someone I really wanted to talk to… Sigh.

UPDATE: A couple more videos from the subway station and so on:

The fact they used this song, and this celebrity, in this commerical, suggests one of these two possibilities:

1. They figured most people don’t know what “I like big butts” means. Which is maybe plausible, since I find most Koreans who aren’t really high-level in English translate whichever Korean word indicates both (is it 엉덩이? That’s the one I learned first and remembered because I heard it so often, so I assume it’s the most common) as “hip” to indicate both hips and butt. Or…
2. Korean culture really does have an extremely different sense of what “big butts” means. Sir Mix-A-Lot would probably be amused.

My guess is maybe both are true.

It’s telling that my main reaction to that video was when they do that chicken-leg move, about 17 seconds in, and I’m thinking, “Damn! How come I can’t do that stretch?” (Because it looks exactly like a leg stretch my swimming instructor taught me, but which I’ve never been able to do correctly.)

Bonus: the best ever renditions of that song (and yeah, I know I’ve posted them before, but…), the first brought to my attention by the estimable and wonderfully mad Tina Connolly:

And the latter being the scarily Vegas Richard Cheese:

Which brings me to this video, which I’ll definitely have to show my students:

Given how popular Friends is here and given how in my Media classes this year, we’ll touch on the formation and negotiation of genres at some point along the way. Show ‘em this video and ask, “What kind of TV show would you expect with this version of the theme song?”

And, okay, Richard Cheese and SF geekery? You probably have seen this, and I’m so not into Star Wars — really! — but one can’t help but be amused at the intricate fondue of all these varieties of cheese:

“Hey, look, a little black girl in her yard! She must be one of those hookers we’re looking for!”

“But the hookers we’re looking for are white. And she’s in her yard, with her doggie, fiddling with the circuit breaker.”

“SO?!?!? She’s totally a whore. I mean, look at how she’s dressed. What, are you scared? There’s four of us and one of her, bro. Come on, let’s go enforce the law.”

[Car door slams.]

“Hey, little black hooker girl. You’re under arrest for prostitution!”

“What?” (Grabs tree.) “Dad!”

“Oh, so you wanna make it hard on yourself, huh? I got a flashlight here and I’m gonna make you sorry. You want me too shoot your puppy-dog?”

Okay, so I’m taking major liberties by making the unspoken (”Hey little black girl!” was probably just “Hey!” and so on), and assuming that the girl’s story is true. Maybe the cops didn’t say those things: I’ve had my share of experiences where different people remember (or claim to remember) different things.

But let’s be realistic here. Let’s say the girl did fight back when these four (or, it’s been claimed elsehwre, it was three) cops tried to arrest her. I would too, if I was being arrested by four — or three, or two, or even one — strange adult men, who are in plainclothes and who could be anyone, really, pretending to be cops and kidnapping me.

Anyone would fight hard. And frankly, a teenaged prostitute would reasonably be expected to fight harder to avoid being kidnapped by strangers–probably much more than your average kid would, given what she’d almost certainly have seen of human nature. So even if they genuinely believed this girl was one of the prostitutes they were looking for, what the hell were they doing handling the situation this way? Is that their normal modus operandi: to cruise the neighborhoods and hop out en masse to arrest teenaged hookers? And expect them to just relax? Given the reputation of the Galveston police force, which is bad enough I’d heard about it all the way up in Montreal when I lived there?

Realistically, we certainly wouldn’t expect even one adult man — let alone several — to beat her up, putting her in the hospital. (I mean, even if she did get violent in the face of proper procedure, don’t they have non-lethal weapons to deal with people they’re arresting? A taser, say? A net gun? Okay, net guns don’t work so well, but there’s a whole world of non-lethal weapons out there. Do cops really have to hit people with flashlights in this day and age?)

And we wouldn’t expect them to fail to, you know, knock on the door and say, “Um, so is this your daughter, ma’am/sir? Oh, sorry, we thought she was someone else.”

We certainly wouldn’t expect them to arrest her and charge her with assault thereafter, or the DA to put the case before the court. Twice. I mean, charging a twelve year old girl, at her own home, with assault against a group of adult men? They’re essentially saying, “She started it!”, and it’s as believable as it is when you hear the football player say it while sneering at the bruised, broken-armed kid in glasses slumped in the chair at the principal’s office.

The bottom line is, every other doubt or excuse aside, this group of policemen must have been ridiculously unskilled if they couldn’t collectively immobilize (or even disarm) a single, presumably unarmed, teenaged girl without putting her in the hospital. Because trust me, there are techniques and tools available that would make it possible. Very possible.

But sadly, we would expect the media and the general public not to pay an iota of attention to this, because, as a number of commenters at BoingBoing noted, stories about little black girls being victimized by the cops just aren’t seen, by the media, as so mediagenic. Unfortunately, I am willing to believe that if she were a blond, blue-eyed child, this would be all over the front pages of newspapers, on TV, and unavoidably part of the public consciousness.

I don’t know anymore whether news of cops being brutal is deemed mediagenic or unmediagenic, but it seems clear to me that the race of the person they beat the crap out of definitely plays a part in how loudly the alarum gets raised by the maistream media. Which is why there are so many more questions about this case than answers, which is why what I’ve written above is mostly speculation, and which is why I don’t expect the case to be handled sensibly in any case.

Which is the very problem why most of what’s above in this post is speculation, not facts:  nobody’s bothered to report it all clearly. In essence, this news story is more full of holes than swiss cheese.

This reminds me of a very disturbing news report that Mike (aka Gumi Teacher) posted — not on his blog, but on Facebook. According to the Chosun Ilbo, an average of 164 Koreans disappear daily in Korea. Go read the article: it’s short, and simple, and a big deal.

No, really, go read it. I’ll wait.

Back?

Okay, well, then. I’ll say first that of course, not all of these cases are kidnappings, murders, or whatever. Some people disappear themselves, like one guy I met who was going by the Korean equivalent of “John Doe,” and said he’d fled his debts in Seoul. I’ve heard of those people who’ve just gone incommunicado from their families, and I can understand why: lots of families are just messy everywhere, and in Korea, the pressures of meeting familial expectations are so much higher that of course some people flee. Some  are teenaged runaways, some are adults who just decide to go it alone.

So we needn’t necessarily assume that it’s a huge rampaging series of kidnappings. But when I read that article, I found a lot of information simply missing, like:

• if the police classify underage disappearances differently than disappearances by adults, which proportion of missing people fall into each category?
• what proportion of the missing people are male, and  what proportion are female?
• in approximately what percentage of the cases is foul play suspected, or a reasonable assumption?
• what is the regional distribution of these cases — are the disappearances concentrated in Seoul, in and around smaller cities, or in the countryside? (Or does it average out to the same?) How many of these missing people are estimated to still be within Korean borders? (Instead of, say, having been trafficked to Guam, or San Francisco, or wherever?)
• how many of the missing people turn up (alive)? In other words, how many missing persons cases end up being solved with a positive outcome? How many are found dead (either by suicide, which is after all rampant here) or murdered? How many simply remain unsolved?
• how many of those missing people are Korean nationals? I’m not suggesting there’s a plot against white hakwon teachers, mind–though now Korean horror movie scripts somewhere between Sympathy for Lady Vengeance and Please Teach Me English are budding in my mind–but I’m thinking of those mail order brides who just turn out to be so recalcitrantly un-Korean when they arrive here. I’m also thinking of Filipinas and others who come here on the promise of singing jobs, but end up being sucked into the sex trade. Approximately how many more people disappear here, but never even get onto the radar? Would it really be so hard to find out if the authorities cared enough to try? (I mean, it’s the sex trade. Customers can find them, after all.)
• the change in disappearnce rate — that is, the apparent ongoing increase — noted in the article doesn’t get mapped onto the different kinds I’ve outlined above. Are more kids disappearing, and fewer adults? Are more young women, and fewer elderly people or young men? Are the rates for all types of disappearance steadily increasing? It’s really hard to even think about ways that these problems could be addressed, or whether the current approach is doing any good, without that information.

In effect, the article leaves out more than it tells. And it makes me wonder why these details, which seem so obviously important (to me at least) aren’t even gestured at, beyond implying that a lot of the cases are of children:

After a law on protection and support for missing children was enacted in 2005, the Police Agency for Missing Children under the Korean National Police Agency was established. It is open 24 hours a day to receive reports and distribute the cases to local police stations.

Besides the obvious gaffe of not including the phone number — my suspicion is that the reporter maybe didn’t feel like compounding the shame… that the details are, in essence, unmediagenic? After all, the above paragraph comes right on the heels of this (emphasis mine, by the way):

The number is considerably higher than in advanced countries. Japan had 88,000 missing and runaway cases in 2007, 22,000 more than Korea in the same year. But that is out of a population of 120 million, 2.5 times greater than Korea’s, so the missing rate is lower. In Korea, 1.3 people out of 1,000 go missing, as against 0.7 in Japan.

(Note the shameful international comparison, a major feature of Korean news stories of this kind.)

If statistics only started being collected in 2006, there could be a variety of reasons why the numbers are growing year by year: maybe there’s more reporting, or more systematic tracking; maybe more cases are being taken seriously instead of dismissed out of hand?

Or maybe the problem is that the special 24-hour task force simply isn’t succeeding in bringing those numbers down. I’m not suggesting that is the case: in fairness, it’s likely far too soon to say, “This approach isn’t working!” on the basis of only a couple of years’ worth of statistics.

But I have trouble, given the quality of reportage above, imagining any point arising at which people could reasonably say, “Yeah, we need to try another method, folks!” When so much information is left out, the most that anyone can (or will) do is go, “Wow! That’s a lot!” and then flip the page (or click that link) to the next story.

It’s as if the nitty-gritty is, likewise, seen as unmediagenic. Though, again, this is an English newspaper in Korea. It would be illuminating to know whether the Korean-language articles on the subject in major newspapers here parceled out more specific information, but it likewise would be telling about what gets deemed mediagenic for a specifically Anglophone, and potentially foreign, audience.

(EDIT: Actually, it also seems the norm in movies, but in a different way: long brooding shots, action scenes five minutes too long, and hyperemotional crying is something we see both on TV melodrama and in films, but I’m particularly thinking of comedy at the moment.)

Or, rather, not “why” but “how it became the case that…” One example is the various gag TV shows like Uchassa and Gag Concert. These are, roughly speaking, the Korean equivalent of Saturday Night Live, except that they’re, well… more cartoon-like? For one thing, everyone, but especially the men, has a bizarre haircut. (Men with what can only be described as a short blunt-cut are often the stars of the comedic scene.) While I’m assured that the wordplay and such is actually quite brilliant, the whole performance strikes one who cannot follow the language quite well enough as, well… as the kind of thing aimed at children. And, indeed, the fact that these are precisely the kinds of shows that elementary schoolkids select as their favorites does little to dissuade me from the sense that the heights of Korean comedy are pretty, er, unsophisticated.

I’m not saying, “Why ain’t there a Korean Lenny Bruce?!?!?” (or Bill Hicks, or George Carlin). I think it’s pretty obvious that such a comedic tradition, if indeed one did exist before the dictatorships, would not have emerged unscathed. (I think any such critical, anti-authoritarian comedic tradition that might have existed in the Joseon era (say, of the sort we glimpsed in the meh-worthy film The King and the Clown) could well have survived Japanese rule, but not Park and Chun’s. I’m sure some nitbrain would call me a communist for saying so, but I don’t care. Fending off communism doesn’t necessitate — or excuse — completely destroying all freedom of thought and crushing diversity within your nation.)

Anyway, I’m posting this not to say that Korean comedy shows are all dumb. There have been films I’ve seen which had a hint of black humour of relatively noteworthy sophistication. (The President’s Last Bang was one, though even I was often perplexed at the idea it was comedy.)

I’m just wondering whether someone who is fluent in both Korean and English, and who is familiar with both these sorts of Korean comedy shows, and with good examples of Western comedy, can tell me whether I’m right in suspecting these shows are just silly, or missing something, or whether they’re essentially dumb, not no more dumb than, say SNL is these days. (Which is pretty dumb, but remember, SNL 20-30 years ago wasn’t so dumb at all. Or am I glorifying Eddie Murphy, Victoria Jackson, and the rest of that lot?)

Anyone? Insights?

Instead:

• There’s some great fiction online that I need to link to. For now, just one story: the wonderfully nastyglee party that is Tina Connolly’s “A Day Out, with Stereoscopes” is up at Birkensnake. I’ve a copy of the zine, actually, and it’s lovely. You could do worse than to subscribe. Tina has a talent for mixing the cute with the horrifying.
• Ever heard of Drapetomania? It’s this disease that can be summed up as “longing to be free and a slave no more.” Yeah, they diagnosed runaway slaves with an illness, meant to explain their desire to run away. Which ought to make you think about, say, for example, ADD and the education system a little more.
• Courtesy of NPR, this is kind of depressing.
  Get the latest news satire and funny videos at 236.com.

  Maybe I should tell my students to memorize everything beforehand after all, in debate class?

• Here’s the RSS feed for new SF books at Manybooks.net. Come on, you know you want it.
• MrChiCity3 on the advantages of a well-stocked kitchen. Hint, these advantages involve women’s nether parts, and suburban chicks fawning over Snapple.
• The purposeful miseducation of America as political strategy backfires: yes, the infection has spread to the political head. Long ago, but this is just, well… Crack a goddamned book, lady. I sure hope whoever’s elected make book-cracking part of a balanced life.
• Speaking of book-cracking: maybe fundamentalists ought to read the Bible sometime?
  

  American Idol, indeed. Two words for you: Bad Precedent.

  Yes, for you viewers at home, that is a golden calf bull (thanks, Charles), with people praying to it. To save the American Economy. More here. You’d think they might have actually read the Bible, sometime before trying to shove it down everyone else’s throat. What can an educated (or even just an intelligent) person do but snicker? (Via plenty of places, but especially Oltheros, who has a rockin’ LJ.)

• You’re young. That makes you suspicious. How could young people support the Republican party? Get out! That’s how to ensure your party is supported in the future, guys…
• James Van Pelt on how to scare a reader, Mike Brotherton on writing as a career vs. writing as a hobby (another reason I’m considering going back to grad school in the medium run), mlawski on the artificiality of “strong female characters” (as opposed to interesting ones –  for interesting, read: flawed, human female characters written the way we write any interesting male characters). Also, on io9, several authors give advice about writing good characters.
• Saw some good talks on TED lately, including this one wherein Steven Pinker argues what I’ve been saying for a while: yeah, humans are still a**holes, but we’re actually getting better… quantifiably so:
  

  More good stuff over at TED. I’m not really sold on Susan Blackmore’s notion of temes, discussed here, but it’s an interesting idea. And while I don’t think Ken Robinson is a truly great public speaker — he meanders so much I start to wonder whether he’s gotten lost — I agree with his argument wholeheartedly. And this 3 minute fairytale of emoticons was fun.

Lots more to post about, but no time, so end off the post, a little happy, cutesy Korean indie-pop by Taru:

Maybe I’d hate it if I were listening closely enough to understand the words, but I’m not, so I don’t. Though watching it I wonder if, being in Korea so long, I have just stopped being revolted by cutesiness? Hmm.

Some out there think this is a godsend to Lee, to take the heat off him for a while. I think this is deeply mistaken: nationalists will be hating Japan, but I don’t think that’ll make them hate Lee any less. After all, Lee was the one who only a few months ago urged Koreans to “let go of the past” and move on so a better, more mature relationship with Japan would be possible. To many, the timing might not seem so accidental… I’ve heard some people draw a direct line between the two events, so it’s quite possible this will just lower Lee’s approval rating even further. Yet more, since he’s gone off on holiday now, in the middle of what lots of Koreans seem to consider a “crisis” with a South Korean shot dead in North Korea, and Japanese textbooks yet again in the news.  (Yes, a short holiday by our standards, but not by those of the average Korean worker — it’s almost as long as the average worker’s yearly allotment of days off, and Lee did after all make a no-holiday pledge.)

But, okay, whatever, I don’t want to discuss all that. If you want to read foreigners ranting about it, there’s tons of foreigner virtriol online that sometimes outstrips even the most amibitious annoyances offered by Korean netizens on the subject. What I want to say is this:

Dear Korea… Please, please consider a better strategy. Please!

Personally, like many Westerners in Korea, I am so not up for a major round of Dokdo-ranting, Dokdo raving, Dokdo T-shirts, Dokdo posters in banks, Dokdo everything 24/7.

I really am not. It’s been a long enough, hot enough, humid and tense enough summer already, and I really don’t need random strangers wandering up to me to teach me about territorial disputes, or, worse, ask leading questions only to act all offended when I give the “wrong” answer. Regardless of the political significance of the issue to Koreans — and it’s their right to care about it if they want — I just find that the earnest rage and horror I saw in the last Dokdo flare-up a few years ago  didn’t help.

Obviously didn’t help, given the current circumstances, though it seems that this is Korea’s standard response to the territorial dispute.

So I’m going to offer a little foreign perspective here. When Koreans get all earnest about Dokdo, it looks silly to people abroad. It looks silly because it looks like people in Korea are actually taking Japan’s claims seriously, instead of laughing at them or saying, “Yeah, right, go f*ck yourself,” to the Japanese government.

It’s a familiar response to me as a Canadian, because many Canadians have a similar national inferiority complex with regards to whoever is less peripheral than them within Canada or internationally. Lots of older Quebecois are all earnestly anti-Anglo-Canada; lots of people out West are all anti-Ontario; and even many Ontarians feel a kind of national inferiority to the USA (and, to a lesser degree in some areas, and a greater degree in others, to Britain). And when Canadians proudly declare, “We’re just as great as the USA!” or “Vancouver is a global quality city!” or, “Canada is the best place in the world to live!” it all but drips inferiority complex.

In Reflections of a Siamese Twin: Canada at the End of the Twentieth Century, Canadian philosopher John Ralston Saul had this to say about the phenomenon:

Positive nationalism is a humanist movement seeking continual reform in order to improve the life of the community. This does include economic well-being, but only as a result of the more important elements — service of the public good, aggressive responsible individualism and culture. What I mean by that is culture in the largest sense, with language at the core of it being used to further the communication of the culture. In the practical terms of everyday life, culture is not about agreement, but about questioning. In other words, culture is not about solidarity, but about discussion and disagreements.

Nationalism, the public good, individualism, culture — we rarely put these concepts together. But if nationalism is not a metaphor for strengthening the well-being of society, it is nothing at all. Or rather, it has been reduced to the exploitation of emotion. And if individualism — in a democracy — is not the participation as a citizen in order to affect the public good, what is it but self-indulgence?

…

Negative nationalism usually identifies a defined national crisis as the primary problem which society must first deal with in order to save itself and thus make it possible to deal with other problems. The other problems are invariably said to be unresolvable because of the national crisis. But the national crisis is usually itself unresolvable in any real terms because it is based on abstract theories of identity or power. Negative nationalism cannot help but demote social reform to a lower level. It tends, in the normal process of political opposition, to end up as an anti-reform movement. (pg. 299-200)

If you look at Korean history, this is precisely how nationalism was built up here: Korea was modernized in a hell of a hurry, but at great expense to a whole teeming mass of individuals who are now living in increasing economic uncertainty. Development was harshly uneven, which is a part of why the southwest is so unrelentingly leftist and the southeast is complacently rightist. It even relates to gender issues: somewhere in the Yonsei university library is a book I need to track down — ooh, wait, it’s this one, which was also recommended by a commenter elsewhere! — which contains a chapter or two about how women’s groups in Korea during the Japanese occupation began to push for reform on women’s issues. They were, eventually, convinced to throw in with the greater nationalist movement on condition that their own policy complaints would be addressed once the bigger issue of Korean soevereignty was resolved, but of course, a new unresolvable existential crisis — the looming threat of communism in the North — served just as effectively as a cornerstone of South Korean nationalism, and also served just as effectively to sideline feminist reforms for decades.

Negative nationalism, in all these cases, caused people to make “sacrifices” for the sake of the nation which didn’t always work out to benefit “the nation” or to address whatever “problem” trumped personal concerns and individual (or even general, common) needs — partly because those national threats have been explicitly chosen to be practically unresolvable. It’s a rather toxic, agreement-enforcing way of shutting down societal dialogue so that the elites, or government, or big business, can get on with the business of doing whatever they do — and let’s be honest, money’s a big part of whatever they all do — while the masses are busy pointing at some distraction and shouting angrily.

So here’s my plea, to all you Koreans out there who are worried about Dokdo: Please, please try a different strategy. Stop being earnest. Stop being so sensitive about this. Stop letting this become the huge issue it becomes. This isn’t a national crisis, it’s a change in textbook guidelines made by  political wingnuts in Japan.

Instead of getting worked up, laugh in their faces. Throw a little ballsy irony into the face of the Japanese government. Hold an international techno-rave part there, with DJs from around the world. (Or build a hotel there for politically conscious ajummas, as has been proposed. It’s got to be safer than sending them to Baekdusan.) Hell, why not install a little hi-tech Buddhist monastery? Spend the rest of the summer with student volunteers building it, habitat for humanity style, and then monks can live out there in three-month shifts. Put some shoulder grease into it!

Make videos on Youtube sarcastically asking whether those Japanese hardliners would perhaps like to have a little of North Korea to go along with the island? Or maybe some cherry blossoms ranges on disused mountains from Jeolla province as garnish? Chuck offensive cracks into their face about how Korean men had better lock up their teenaged daughters, considering what happened last time Japan started eyeing Korean territory. Make amusing, over-the-top translations from Japanese textbooks that reflect what you think is the Japanese government’s real mentality. Hell, make a satirical webcast of the Japanese government’s nefarious plans to take over Dokdo and open a rip in the fabric of the universe from which they can summon millions of Flesh-Eating Interdimensional Hello Kitty Ghouls to wipe out humankind. If you can work in some Akira or Ghost in the Shell cracks, the rest of the world might get it, too. Or, no, wait, I recommend Hello Kitty. Everyone knows (and hates) Hello Kitty. Imply that Japanese PM Yasuo Fukuda is channeling the ghost of Hirohito (and give the old emperor a lisp and make him talk in teen-girly Japanese, while you’re at it).

Write satirical essays on how Korea should give the rocks to Japan, because the country obvious has small-balls issues and this is the only way to stop Japanese politicians from sending young conscripts going on murder and rape ramages in Africa (the only place quite as poor as Korea was when they did it here, and perhaps the only place they could get away with it this time). If Japan is not given Dokdo, then millions of young Japanese men will be forced to contract AIDS in their war to protect Africa from, er, well… whatever it is decided is threatening Africa. (Rampaging Flesh-Eating Interdimensional Hello Kitty Ghouls?)

Explain how we should feel sympathy for the poor Japanese politicians who, after all, everyone knows are a bunch of wimp hentai and yaoi obsessive otaku fanboys and that of course they have lost their grip on reality through excessive masturbation during official meetings of the Ministry of Bukkake Relations. (Luridly cite Lord Baden-Powell or some other nutty Victorian Englishman on the effects of excessive masturbation.) Cite papers from obscure Korean medical studies “proving,” PD Diary-style, that excessive group masturbation has feralized the Japanese government, and note that Dokdo would be a perfect place for them to be placed for isolation from human society for the sake of the whole world.

Okay, maybe all of that is both over-the-top and not the kind of jokes Koreans would make to mock Japanese politicians. [And the last bunch of jokes probably wouldn't win over the Japanese left, which you should try to do.] So just mock these guys in whatever way makes sense to you, feels natural and funny to you. What I’m saying is, you’ll get far more enjoyment out of creatively ridiculing the Japanese government, and by not taking its claims seriously, you’ll look like you have this whole thing in perspective. Which, frankly, the Korean populace didn’t look like last time the issue flared up. And people will be laughing, which is very often a good thing. You won’t look like you’re lending the Japanese right any credibility.

Wait until a gun gets fired before taking this thing seriously enough to get angry or make this a major national talking point, okay, folks? And foreigners — take a hint from Rob: find other things to look at and write (or talk) about, if you can’t approach it from some other angle, lest you get sucked into the tabloidy world of Korea-blogs where a tiny minority of rage-filled extremists somehow gets mistaken for the vast, nation-defining majority, and lest you find yourself once again just ranting about how annoying the Dokdo panic is. Focus on something else! That’s what I’ll be doing!

And that’s all I want to say about Dokdo!

…if we were interested in finding balance you could look around and find all kinds of ads objectifying men, too.

A big alarm bell went off in my head when I read that, but not because I had a sudden revelation that ads objectify male bodies. Advertisements really do objectify female bodies in a much more in-your-face way, and more often, than they do male bodies. (And, similarly, the presence of the happy wife in an advertisement for fridges is a positive, and central presence; the good, beloved husband who “provided” the fridge is peripheral, if it is present at all in the ad.)

This is a great, great anthology of academic essays, if you're interested in not just discussions of manga and anime, but also of the history and development of prose SF in Japan, and how they connect. Some great stuff in here.

Of course, the parallel to objectification of women’s bodies in advertising might not be simply or straightforwardly the objectification of men’s bodies in advertising. I’ve mentioned that I’m partway through a collection of essays on Japanese SF titled Robot Ghosts and Wired Dreams, and a passage from the essay by Kotani Mari, translated by Miri Nakamura, titled “Alien Spaces and Alien Bodies in Japanese Women’s Science Fiction” came to mind.

(Incidentally, it’s a fascinating essay that discusses early women’s SF in Japan during the 1970s, including a look at the fascinating life of one Suzuki Izmui, apparently a onetime famous porn-star and nude model turned drug-experimentalist who married a famous Japanese saxophonist and settled down to write arguably feminist SF, SF ironically humorous but at the same time deeply critical of what she considered “shallow Japanese consumerism” in the 80s, before she killed herself in 1986. Basically, she sounds like the female Japanese equivalent of Philip K. Dick. Who’d've thunk it?)

Anyway, all that aside, this passage from early on in the essay comes to mind, where Nakamura is discussing the differences in how male and female SF authors depicted mothers and domestic spaces — men did it sentimentally, and women tended to focus on conflicts and stifling oppressiveness of both the relationships and domestic spaces:

…The notion of the house as a claustrophobic space has become so firmly embedded in the Japanese worldview that the body images of sons and daughters have altered in order to conform with it.

These changes are especially evident for male bodies depicted by female writers, as adolescent male bodies are usually idealized images. This idealization can be seen in situations wheremale figures become the objects of romantic affairs. The alteration of male bodies can be understood as the desire of women to appropriate the idealized masculine images constructed by male-centered ideologies for themselves. Altered male images appear in romance novels as individuals dressed in male clothing but who embody feminine beauty, and in soap operas (ren’ai dorama) in the form of male-male relationships. It is likely that these kids of male images appear in numerous works of female science fiction because fantastic narratives describing strange transformations of humans are common in the world of science-fiction. So-called slash fiction by foreign female writers also deploys similar narratives. These trends undoubtedly owe much to the fact that, in the market for women’s science fiction, texts such as shōjo comics and shōjo novels are all targeted at female consumers and establish a female-oriented cosumer code.

That’s a little impenetrable, but what the essay basically unpacks is that, in a lot of Japanese women’s SF a few factors come into play:

• anxieties about the presentation of “feminism” as a foreign phenomenon — either eggheaded ivory-towerism, or radical extremism — led many women in the 70s, at least, to disavow any interest in “feminism” while themselves being essentially quite concerned with “feminist” issues and sometimes even using the same language as feminists to discuss the same issues
• anxieties about how to create and depict imagined “female” spaces that were not defined by men, leading to spaces absent of men… leading to anxieties about that apparent lack, incidentally something we see in some Western feminist utopias, too.
• one kind of transfiguration apparently resultant of these anxieties, and which recurs througout Japanese women’s SF, is a transformation of women from the kinds of forms they are depicted as having in men’s writing — nostalgically beloved mothers, sexually appealing partners, and innocent children, in other words, the kind of women who get squeezed into bikinis to advertise telephones, or tight jeans and crop-tops to advertise soju — into monstrous, horrifying, and inhuman forms.
• another trope of tansfiguration in Japanese women’s SF, and one that according to Nakamura is inextricably linked to the previous one, is to transform male forms in one of several ways, either beastializing them, using pairs of male twins to evoke a sense of eeriness, all the way to yaoi fiction, which is essentially what we in the West call “slash” fiction, the most familiar case in SF circles — the case most non-”slash/yaoi” readers snicker about when we’re sure that there are no slash fanfic writers around — being the sort of fiction where Spock and Kirk are gay lovers.

All of that is interesting insofar as it applies to Japanese SF, but what really sets off my alarm bells here is the notion that, since 2002, perhaps these tropes somehow — through manga, through cross-fertilization of culture, through whatever other means that cultures move across narrow channels of water — these tropes hit the mainstream in South Korean pop culture.

The first image that comes to mind, of course, is of figures like Lee Jun Ki and Rain, who, in the images below, seem to give of a surprisingly feminine air.

Rain, dressed and coiffed like a younger, hipper kind of ajumma.

Who's girlier, Rain or the female security guard? You tell me.

Lee Jun Ki, in what is, indeed, a sweater so girly many women I know would refuse to don it.

Lee again. Note the eye makeup and the cut of the vest -- quite similar to the cut of some of the Wonder Girls' tops, at times.

And it’s worth noting that Lee Jun Ki, by far the girliest of the bunch, cut his teeth playing a very sexually ambiguous character whom it is very strongly implied had sexual relations with a Korean king (the Joseon Dynasty King Yeonsan) in what, all things considered, might be the biggest budget example of slash fanfic yet, 2005 blockbuster The King and the Clown, more ambiguously titled in Korean, “왕의 남자” — The King’s Man.

Poster for 왕의 남자 (THE KING AND THE CLOWN). The poster quite correctly depicts your standard classic Ann Radcliffe-era Gothic love triangle, which in a sense plays out in the film. But with the three men in the poster above. Note the sensuous touch of the younger, feminized male character, played by Lee Jun Ki, on the shoulder of his king and, ahem, master...

(It might be anti-fanfic, maybe, in fact; King Yeonsan seems to have been villified as the worst Korean king ever in the TV drama Daejangum, and he does, after all, fall in love with a male jester who mocks him publicly.)

But for all that overt girliness and even outright depiction of homosexuality it may well be that what makes so many foreigners — especially adamantly straight Western men like myself — find that Korean pop star known as Yon-sama in Japan — so subtly unheimliche is some softness in his appearance, not so much as Lee Jun-Ki, of course, but perhaps just enough to work the subterranean grammar of that “female-oriented cosumer code” Nakamura discusses.

Bae, pictured here Staring Girlishly into his cell phone.

The first picture I ever saw of Bae. Please pause for a moment of silence and a shudder of ick.

Wait! This fashion looks familiar!

From some historical (fantasy ?) drama I haven't seen. It looks to me to be very manga, and recalls Lee Jun Ki somewhat...

It may be that the oft-discussed pink shirts here, and the odd young man you meet who wears eyeliner or base, is working those codes, too. Very odd, but not quite so rare… every female in my conversation class had an strong and distinct opinion based on experience as to whether men wearing makeup is cool or not, when the topic came up last semester. Perhaps it goes some way to explaining the strange pride you find in those rare males you encounter who declare their favorite music to be “발라드” — “balladuh,” that is, ballads, which comprise a whole genre until itself here — as if it were a mark of sophistication, might well also be doing their best to exploit (in the dating-game, attractiveness, mating-competition sense of “exploit”) that female consumer code.

After all, it’s not as if all of the men who are girlified in the media have to be depicted in that way. Lee Jun Ki, maybe, is famous for his girlish looks, but in the case of the other two I’ve mentioned, it seems likelier that there has been a conscious (or unconscious, maybe) choice to feminize them in public appearances, and one being made to the exclusion of more manly, macho possibilities, as the photos below — of Rain and of Bae, showing their muscles — suggest:

Bae Yong Joon, with muscles not hidden by pink shirt or white cashmere sweater.

Rain pumping iron.

But the rabbit hole maybe goes deeper. Matt at Gusts of Popular Feeling posted about a video dating back to early 2002, and a more recent movie, in which males are humiliated in various ways, a couple of them after odd forms of fantastical transformation — their bodies fed to animals, their heads sprouting from to a mechanical riding bull or, in the fascinating film Sympathy for Lady Vengeance, the body of a dog that is then shot dead, as in the images below, stolen shamelessly from Matt. (But go read his post, now, before you continue on!)

Bestial transformation AND mechanization...

A similar horrific transformation pointed out by the ever-brilliant Matt.

Yes, some of those males who are humiliated in the SES video aren’t explicitly transformed, but… wait: they’re white, foreign males, in situations where, with the exception of the casino (as far as I know, casinos were, at least in 2002, foreigners-only in Korea) it would seem to make more (literal) sense for Korean men to be! How many Korean women actually lead meetings with foreign business partners, let alone standing up to them when they aren’t listening? How many film sets employ Korean women as camera operators, and all-white crews? Well, maybe SES is imagined to be working on film sets in L.A., casinos in Texas, and running companies in New York, but this is a product of the Korean media, made for consumption in Korea. Either way, there’s some kind of fantasy at play here. It’s pretty arguable the dominance-and-revenge dynamic could be made with Korean men just as easily, if not more so, as with white men.

In the comments section of Matt’s post, linked above, I claimed that this is a pretty effective way to (a) sublimate revenge fantasies of (some) Korean women directed at Korean men into something socially acceptable, while (b) presenting revenge fantasies that (some) Korean men are likelier to get behind or maybe even partake of themselves. Of course, there’s probably a little of (b) at play in (a) as well — surely those revenge fantasies on Korean men are as socially objectionable to a number of Korean girls and women themselves, and not just to men.

But it strikes me, now that I have Nakamura in mind, that given the political culture and what some of my more academic would call “the Korean imaginary” — the repertoire of connections and tropes that exist in the collective fantastical imagination of Korean society — that given how it’s pretty arguably behaving in ways more descriptive of the way Korean men regard Korean women in the workplace, the “whitening” of these men who are, is, indeed, another particular unspoken “transformation” of male bodies. It may also be a way of masculinizing them in a way that makes them simultaneously alien on several levels at once.

Woah, tangly! What I’m saying is that maybe using white guys to represent Korean male sexism and gender inequality might, indeed, be another form of this kind of transformation Nakamura is talking about: perhaps, to the imaginative repertoire that includes feminization and bestialization, we should include transformation of Korean men into foreign men. Which has somewhat unnerving connotations in terms of how race and bestialization may link up in the imaginative palette, but then, it’s not like that’s not a familiar theme from other cultures, including my own:

Just another form of blackface. King Kong as racial bestialization of the American black man, with white woman in hand.

Fascinating stuff, but now it has me wondering to what degree Japanese yaoi has, in terms of publication, made it over here. I know that homegrown yaoi exists in Korea (featuring young male celebrities and boy-band members, by the account I heard) , though not much more than that, and that even as far back as 2002, middle school gils in places like Iksan were consuming and creating it online, and simultaneously experimenting with their identity in “lesbian clubs” that, while they likely involved no real lesbian exprimentation, probably did participate in an imaginative reconstruction of their world as “female-centered”… to whatever degree it is that, you know, middle school kids can really do that.

All of which brings me back to the interesting paradox, which I commented about at Matt’s post above, where the Korean girl-group Wonder Girls can be read as simultaneously working two distinct audiences:

1. Younger (especially teenage) female consumers, wherein the group enacts a female space where feminine sexuality is expressible, and can be celebrated, and in which the males with whom they interact are, when bad, punished, and otherwise seem to be helplessly under control of women, who, nonetheless, seem to prefer one anothers’ company to that of annoying, weird boys, as I argued here…
2. Older male consumers, who get a titillating view into a fantasy world that is both hyperfeminized and skirting (literally) the boundaries of socially acceptable interest because of the youth of some of its members, and for whom the punishment of “bad” men definitely reinforces the “naughtiness” of their participation in the videos as male consumers, while further underlining (like the piecemeal quasi-schoolgirl uniforms the band members often wear) the very risqué way that the videos promote and depicts pubescent females, as James has famously discussed here (as well as in other places).

And I think that deserves some attention. The pictures from one fansite (Wonder Girls Wonderland) reveal pretty clearly that not all the attention that the Wonder Girls get from men is so negative as to come from old men. The pictures below are all labeled in such a way as to suggest they’re promotional materials for their second album:

Wholesome young men reacting as one might expect they would... This and other images show the Wonder Girls receiving rather cartoon-like, but obviously sexual, attention. And being amused by it, but seemingly not, you know, desperate for it or anything like that. Golly, those silly boys... Isn't this a form of stylized niaveté we're being hit over the head with here? Multileveled codes, indeed.

Yet, for all of that, so far, all the dance sequences I’ve seen seem to be all-girl affairs. Exercises in performative female homosociality, as it were. One wonders whether it’s logistical issues that keep the young men relegated to promo shots, and not on the dance floor with the girls, or whether the band’s managing company, JYP, is quite aware of the double-fantasy it presents and is intent on maintaining it as long as it can.

The dance in a feminized space.

Which, whatever you think of it on an ethical level, certainly would demonstrate strong business acumen. In this case, it’s not butts in seats that matter so much as butts on screens –

Sexualization, or nascent sexuality?

– that will make piles and piles of money, as with the whole phenomenon of girl-bands and boy-bands seems to do, by capitalizing on the intersecting anxieties about discrete feminine or masculine spaces, and of nascent sexuality, which are, realistically, the domain of fantasy and impossible in the real world. And nascent it clearly is: “sexy” dance moves alternate with “kiddie” ones, and it’s no accident that the youngest member of the band, during her fantastical scene as a superstar exiting a limo to the flash of dozens of cameras, suddenly trips and falls. It’s very clearly a kind of wink at the fact she’s not yet a superstar, not yet a grown-up ready to participate in the popstardom that, on some subtle fantastical level for teenagers everywhere, is somehow linked to adulthood and all that it entails.

But one must wonder, have images of such transformations — females into shared, hyperfeminized spaces and into monstrous or hyperfeminine forms, and meanwhile males into beastly, foreign-beastly, or feminized forms — penetrated deeply into Korean pop culture, and if so, why?

What do you think?

UPDATE: As I was hiking the mountain, a few more examples hit me of Transformations — which, indeed, may serve also to answer Mark’s question of the value of studying old stuff in the comments below, as old stuff has a weird habit of coming back:

Black face in Korea seems to be acceptable — at least to the point of some people not getting why it might not be — as a form of transformation in pop culture. The Bubble Sisters (discussed here by an understandably disgusted Michael) seemed to use it to cash in on some kind of “black chic”:

Perhaps, a case of Koreans importing something foreign and taking it to new extremes? Is this a Korean mis-adoption of Japanese Ganguro? (The thought comes to mind since Michael compares Korean blackface to Ganguro in his post, linked above.)

… whilst Korean members of the Raelian cult seemed to think it tied somehow to sexuality — one assumes, at least, since it doesn’t seem tied to the other Raelian obsession of UFOs:

… and other appearances on TV, from the controversy-igniting blackface routine on Misuda:

… to this video, seem to be some kind of return to the (ahem) “It’s just so darn funny to see blacks impersonated poorly by non-blacks!”

I’d swear there was another example that came to mind, but now it escapes me. Perhaps another update later…

Whup! There it is! It brought to mind Virginia Woolf’s Orlando, which is a hell of a novel — read it if you can, and if you can’t find the time for the novel, even if it is available online for free, then get hold of the movie, starring Tilda Swinton — but really, read the book, it’s so worth it.. The bit I’m going to refer to is in both, and it’s from memory — my copy of the novel is in my office. Orlando is about a man living in Elizabethan England and his life, which… well, he basically doesn’t age or die. He ought to, everyone around him does, but he doesn’t. He ends up going off to the Orient, and at some point, becomes a woman, and the novel traces his life from there on. Like I said, it’s a freaking brilliant novel, and you’ll love it, even if you don’t like Woolf. The movie’s pretty damned good, too.

Anyway, there’s this funny little riff that occurs at the beginning, and it’s used in the film, the first bit, and recurs at the end (in the film only, though), about androgyny and fashion:

He–for there could be no doubt of his sex, though the fashion of the time did something to disguise it–was in the act of slicing at the head of a Moor which swung from the rafters. It was the colour of an old football, and more or less the shape of one, save for the sunken cheeks and a strand or two of coarse, dry hair, like the hair on a cocoanut. Orlando’s father, or perhaps his grandfather, had struck it from the shoulders of a vast Pagan who had started up under the moon in the barbarian fields of Africa; and now it swung, gently, perpetually, in the breeze which never ceased blowing through the attic rooms of the gigantic house of the lord who had slain him.

Orlando’s fathers had ridden in fields of asphodel, and stony fields, and fields watered by strange rivers, and they had struck many heads of many colours off many shoulders, and brought them back to hang from the rafters. So too would Orlando, he vowed. But since he was sixteen only, and too young to ride with them in Africa or France, he would steal away from his mother and the peacocks in the garden and go to his attic room and there lunge and plunge and slice the air with his blade. Sometimes he cut the cord so that the skull bumped on the floor and he had to string it up again, fastening it with some chivalry almost out of reach so that his enemy grinned at him through shrunk, black lips triumphantly. The skull swung to and fro, for the house, at the top of which he lived, was so vast that there seemed trapped in it the wind itself, blowing this way, blowing that way, winter and summer. The green arras with the hunters on it moved perpetually. His fathers had been noble since they had been at all. They came out of the northern mists wearing coronets on their heads. Were not the bars of darkness in the room, and the yellow pools which chequered the floor, made by the sun falling through the stained glass of a vast coat of arms in the window? Orlando stood now in the midst of the yellow body of an heraldic leopard. When he put his hand on the window-sill to push the window open, it was instantly coloured red, blue, and yellow like a butterfly’s wing. Thus, those who like symbols, and have a turn for the deciphering of them, might observe that though the shapely legs, the handsome body, and the well-set shoulders were all of them decorated with various tints of heraldic light, Orlando’s face, as he threw the window open, was lit solely by the sun itself. A more candid, sullen face it would be impossible to find. Happy the mother who bears, happier still the biographer who records the life of such a one! Never need she vex herself, nor he invoke the help of novelist or poet. From deed to deed, from glory to glory, from office to office he must go, his scribe following after, till they reach whatever seat it may be that is the height of their desire. Orlando, to look at, was cut out precisely for some such career.

– yes, I’m indulging, but what gorgeous prose! — and here’s a reflection on sex and fashion from later on in the novel:

… If we compare the picture of Orlando as a man with that of Orlando as a woman we shall see that though both are undoubtedly one and the same person, there are certain changes. The man has his hand free to seize his sword, the woman must use hers to keep the satins from slipping from her shoulders. The man looks the world full in the face, as if it were made for his uses and fashioned to his liking. The woman takes a sidelong glance at it, full of subtlety, even of suspicion. Had they both worn the same clothes, it is possible that their outlook might have been the same.

That is the view of some philosophers and wise ones, but on the whole, we incline to another. The difference between the sexes is, happily, one of great profundity. Clothes are but a symbol of something hid deep beneath. It was a change in Orlando herself that dictated her choice of a woman’s dress and of a woman’s sex. And perhaps in this she was only expressing rather more openly than usual–openness indeed was the soul of her nature–something that happens to most people without being thus plainly expressed. For here again, we come to a dilemma. Different though the sexes are, they intermix. In every human being a vacillation from one sex to the other takes place, and often it is only the clothes that keep the male or female likeness, while underneath the sex is the very opposite of what it is above. Of the complications and confusions which thus result everyone has had experience; but here we leave the general question and note only the odd effect it had in the particular case of Orlando herself.

Christ! the prose. To write like that woman. But, I swoon! I tell you once more: read this book!

Woolf’s interest in the admixture of the sexes is interesting because it raises the point that this is not an essentially phenomenon — or, rather, that the traits of each gender were not partitioned in other times as they are today. Men were praised, in the days when the Gawain-poet issued forth his poems, for being “wasp-waisted”– which is to say, I suppose, for having a slender waist and some curves on either side of it — and in Chaucer, specifically in “The Knight’s Tale,” we see a men weeping like it’s going out of style.

But of course, gender roles have differed in the past, you may well say, and I will agreed, of course, and this is a BDO — a Big Duh Observation, which is to say, it’s blitheringly obvious.

What is not obvious to me — and it may just be my ignorance, the field may well be fully-mined out — how in postmodern societies, these gender role partitionings undergo rapid, sudden changes, for what reason, and what role popular cultures — especially those imported from abroad — play in societies like Korea’s, which is, at its core, has long been an importing consumer of foreign popular culture much more than a creating, exporting generator of new popular culture — especially popular culture that redefines gender or race in any fantastical way.

That said, one wonders whether Japanese popular culture has transmitted the conscious effeminizing of maleness to Korea, and whether, in turn, Korean popular culture (recently so in vogue in the rest of Asia… for example, according to my Chinese exchange students, significantly impacting Chinese pop culture) has in turn retransmitted this to other parts of Asia.

Again, tangly. Time to retire, till the next installment in this erstwhile series.

With pictures of people lining up outside of meat markets with coolers in hand to buy US beef undoubtedly public opinion is going to shift greatly in favor of US beef.

Well, yes, that’s true. And yet…

Amusingly, or depressingly, I’m not sure which, both the Joongang Ilbo and the Maeil Gyeongjae (Daily Economics) have already had to issue apologies for using staged photos with fake consumers to accompany stories on the, er, sweeping changes of public opinion.

The Joongang used a reporter and an intern, and the Maeil used servers working in the shop. Who knows if the beef is even really US beef. In any case, both newspapers have apologized. My question is, if opinions have changed so radically, how come they had to set up fake photo ops? Bit of a hurry, no?

I’ve often observed to people in the last few months that, yes, the Joongang, Dong-a, and Chosun (Ilbos, all) are skewed and unbalanced… but that so is the Hankyoreh and pretty much all media in Korea. (All media anywhere, but the more diversity, the more differing viewpoints flourish, the more balance — or so one hopes.) If only people on both sides of the political spectrum could realize that the newspapers supporting their own side are as trashy as those supporting the other side, it’d be a big breakthrough.

But as a short-term compromise, I’ll settle for groups of netizens on each side pointing out when the other side publishes frauds and fakeries. And that’s one of the interesting things. Fifteen years ago, a guy would have sat up, while staring at the page, and said, “Hey! I know her! She’s an intern at that newspaper, and that’s one of the reporters she works with!” Then he would have showed a couple of friends, if they were around, and he’d have gone back to reading, the fakery in general not commented upon.

Nowadays, the internet makes it ridiculously easy to get from random individual recognizing the person in the picture… to the official apology by the newspaper. And moreover, the apology not being printed in some tiny corner of the newspaper, but instead ending up published in a minor newspaper, and via linkage and popularity, ending up on main news aggregators.

Not a perfect system — lots of misquotations and fantastical claims never get apologized for or corrected, and by lots I mean lots! Somewhere, there’s a newspaper in an archive or two from 2002 where it’s claimed (from a misquote, of course) that I myself have authored at least one novel about the Taiping Rebellion, which is news to me. But you know, there are a couple of more failsafes than 15 years ago, and they’re liklier to work on prominent news, more than on obscure stuff like the bio of a horn player in a rock band.

Surely, though, newspapers are going to catch on and get more sophisticated in how they fake and misquote people and stage their news stories. Surely.

Unless, of course, the Internet kills newspapers first. I’m not betting on it, but just the same, EPIC 2015 is a fascinating little flash video on recent internet history dovetailing into an interesting speculative future history of media.

Screenshot from someone browsing Daum today.

One side reports that a protester was half-blinded by a water cannon used by police, and on the other side, the headline underlined in red suggests (roughly) that “claims of injuries from water cannons are lies.”

(I know, I know, it’s the internet, but this really is what it’s like in the print media too. No wonder nobody I know here who actually thinks on a daily basis trusts the news, especially the mainstream news, and no wonder demonstrators have been ejecting reporters from the major [conservative] newspapers from the demonstration zone as a matter of course.)