Futures of Learning

This literature review began with an expectation to learn about everyday practices of Korean youth who are exposed to one of the most techno-savvy environments. Since the last decade, a period of time in which Korea transformed itself into Digital Korea, Korean youth have been indulging in the latest new media technologies – from broadband Internet to mobile TV- and continuously making up the rules of its use ad hoc. No other generation of Korean youth has had such cultural power through the use of technology. They are major residents and managers of vast online communities, avid gamers who support the world’s largest online game industry, and users of the newest mobile media. Korean youth’s roles as early adopters and explorers of new media technologies elevate their position to the bearers of future hope: social agents who are compelled to continue future national development in an ever-evolving IT Korea. Most of all, studies of Korean youth media practices provide a fascinating lead to further our awareness about the integral role of culture in shaping technological use, by manifesting how the local appropriation of technology prefigures the potential of technology.

So far, in spite of Korea’s reputation for the most vibrant new media culture, Korean youth’s concrete practices and tactics of navigating this highly charged techno-sphere are not well known to the rest of the world. To fill the gap of knowledge in regards to the ‘locality’ of global digital youth culture, I attempted to draw from as many Korean studies on Korean digital youth as possible. Although the majority of studies on youth practices of new media technologies in Korea revolve around the issues of policies and media effects, it is notable that Korean scholars unanimously confirm the centrality of participatory youth culture in the establishment of Korean new media space across every ICT-sectors. However, as major commercial sites such as portals, Cyworld, Lineage, and Pandora TV become the center of academic attention, youth practices outside of these commercially established media spaces still remain unexplored. In this context, the recent candlelight protest is interesting in that it demonstrates how young people quickly took over established media spaces through their salient and creative use of new media technologies, though momentarily, to mobilize public opinions. The dramatic transformation of fangirls into ‘candlelight sonyeo (girls)’ during the candlelight protest suggests the further potential of new media technologies in cultivating a new mode of civic engagement and political communication beyond the boundary of online.

Under current circumstances where the Korean government and media industry are increasingly blatant and more direct in their control of the creation and distribution of online media content, however, it is not certain if Korean youth online culture is heading toward a bright future that fully maximizes the prospectus of Korea’s renowned technological progress. The notorious “Minerva Case” early this year - in which a star power blogger was persecuted for his critical posts on current government’s economic policies- shows that the power of online space as an alternative channel to expand the freedom of speech is still a vulnerable construct. This tension between regulations and disruptions in regards to the public adaptation of new media technologies is not something new. On a brighter note, as young people continue to respond to and intercept these restrictive attempts with more creative tactics, a new form of public knowledge on how to counteract or measure this centralizing hegemony will accumulate accordingly.
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