Over the last few years I’ve been trying to understand why so many Koreans seem to support the idea that Korea needs top-down censorship and top-down elimination of anonymity online. They often cite the abhorrent behaviour of “Korean netizens” as evidence, with the Dog Poop Girl cited as a minor example and the suicides of many pop stars who were criticized online as major evidence of the cruelty and need for firmer controls online. (Michael has a post up that pretty much says the same thing I’ve been saying since I first encountered this weird rationalization: that a pop star …
Tag: KOREA
Fairness, Competition, and Roll Call (Plus Festivals and Sports Days)
Only one of the people who was supposed to lead a discussion in my morning Listening & Speaking class was there when I arrived to start class. (And I was a minute late myself!) I asked, “Are we having discussions today? Who is leading today?” And nobody said a word, so I went ahead and had someone take attendance, and then went off on a discussion tangent, about taking attendance in class. Earlier this semester, one of my foreign students wrote an essay about the abolition of roll call in University classes. Regardless of the essay’s strengths and weaknesses, some …
Haeinsa Security, and the Chinese Earthquake
Haeinsa is the temple where the Tripitaka Koreana, carved meticulously on wooden plates, is stored. It’s a major site in Korea as far as heritage goes. I wish I’d photographed the info plate in front of the woodblock storage area, because it was more than a little amusing. It explained how the Buddhist scriptures were carved into wood in order to concentrate the power and force of Buddhism and guard Korea against Mongol invasion. So then, when the Mongols invaded and left the carvings as ashes, they went ahead and carved it all again. Well, we ended up wandering past …
Drunken Suit + KTX = Not Fun
I’m on the KTX from Busan to Seoul now. The train actually offers an Internet connection for a flat rate of W1000 (a little less than a dollar US)… if you’re a Korean citizen running Internet Explorer on Windows, that is. Foreigners running Linux will have to have a dual boot and a Korean girlfriend to log them in. Yay for the Hub of Asia, I’m sure the whole Pacific Rim is just waiting eagerly to be denied basic access to most things! Not to mention drunken guys in suits on trains. Now, it’s one thing when you encounter a …
Stuff Going On
Been busy like mad, and traveling for the next few days, but briefly: I’m getting my students to release stuff (or let me release their stuff) online. The first in a series of projects is now up at YouTube: my Korean students considered popular stereotypes believed in Korea about foreign countries (like France, America, South and Southest Asia, China, and Japan) and then went out and asked people from those countries what they think and feel about those stereotypes. That’s how you turn a somewhat disturbing class discussion into a learning experience. More to come: remixes/creative work from my Media …
Flashmobsters
The flashmob is not new, but flashmobsters? Googling shows I’m not so brilliant as I thought — the term’s been used before online, but that won’t stop me writing about the potential criminal uses of flashmobs by organized crime, especially when they have the advantage of working in a city where everything, including law enforcement, has been privatized. Yeah, it’s political SF, since the current administration is privatizing almost everything here, and yeah, it’s set in Seoul. Lots of young male and female twiggi — that’s a Korean word that often has a connotation rather like what people tend to …
It’s Not Just the Lateness of Industrialization: How and Why Korean SF Doesn’t Quite Work
I should be grading in-class essays, but my guilt at not yet having done so has been assuaged by the fact that another professor in the department, someone above me, confessed to not having graded her midterms either, and not feeling the slightest bit badly about it! So among all the other insanity of the last week, I also spent some time working up a couple of abstracts for a conference that I think I have no realistic shot at, mostly because I’m not an “official” Korea studies scholar, but at least one of my abstracts was for an essay …
Lest My Rage Seem Misspent
UPDATE: There’s no more reason to be cautious now, so I’ll just come out with it, and hope Google gets used in the hiring process in Korea soon. The seemingly-alcoholic, clearly racist, sexist, and scummy foreign English teacher I discuss in the post below is named Patrick Stewart, who worked in South Korea at the Catholic University of Korea during 2008. (I think from 2007-2009, or maybe from 2006-2008?) I know personally of at least three cases in which he sexually harassed female instructors at our university, the Catholic University of Korea, including very late at night at their apartment …
Mad Cow Update
As I’ve said before, it’s worth listening to what scientists say. I’m willing to listen when the Professors Kim of Hallim University say that their research findings have been wrongfully exaggerated by those who oppose US beef. Others online have pointed out how unfortunate (yes, truly) it is that Koreans aren’t (yet) up in arms about other issues that need serious attention, from traffic fatalities to avian influenza — which is true, and I really wish people were. We’ve got H5CN1 in the neighborhood now. (To that I’d add reforming police service, which right now is almost as useless as …
Free Speech? F*ck You, Citizens!
How is a democracy supposed to work when citizens can be criminally prosecuted for disagreeing with the government? It’s too bad that there’s nobody left outside Korea who can pressure the government here to actually allow criticism, differing opinions, and so on. But hey, when the major governments of the world are convinced they have God on their side… The national prosecution and police say they are going to criminally prosecute people involved in spreading so-called “mad cow horror stories” (gwangubyeong goedam) on the Internet, in addition to prosecuting the organizers of candlelight protests against imports of American beef. A …