The Most Wired Country

I expected more from this Spero News article, The world?s most wired country: Joshua Snyder looks at the cyber-culture of South Korea and what it may hold in store for the rest of the world. I was anticipating a description of innovative uses of blogging, online community via chat rooms and listservs, conversations on message boards, virtual reality & avatars, social networking on full tilt, or alerts via rss and notifications. Instead, it’s citizen journalism (that’s innovative), minihompys (25% of South Koreans have personal home pages), and cybercash (okay, think Paypal with more ubiquity.)

Perhaps this cultural framework about Korean society shows how technology gets used in a non-egalitarian, non-democratized, well-defined roles kind of place:

Another factor lending to the growth of a cyber-culture in South Korea is its highly stratified Confucian society. Age is all-important, and a difference of one year makes for a senior-junior relationship, full of mutual obligations that must be fulfilled and roles that cannot be transgressed. Korea?s highly codified language marks differences for age level; the younger speaker is required to use elaborate honorifics when speaking to someone only slightly older. A Korean proverb says that there is a generation gap between twins.