21st century maxim: the personal is political in the Korean blogging world

By FN DHAKA, Bangladesh,

“There’s power in getting people to talk. When voices get online, and can express themselves, this in itself unleashes a whole new chemistry.” Hana Kim – better known by her cyberidentity as ‘Dalgun’ – clearly understands the relevance of her work. The soft-spoken 26-year-old Dalgun is part of the APC-member Korean progressive network Jinbonet (jinbo.net). She talks about the tactics she is involved with to get youngsters to blog. APCNews has met her in Dhaka, Bangladesh in mid-April.


Dalgun has an unusual background. For someone involved in the very-practical world of cyberspace, she studied philosophy, and she sees computing is "just a hobby". She’s been working on computing though since way back in 2000.


"Jinbonet’s blog service was launched in July 2004. By now we’ve got around 1700 bloggers. Almost all are from civil society, non governmental organisations (NGOs), labour unions," she explains via a colleague who translates.


This is a free service from Jinbonet. Blogging is growing in popularity in Korea. It has been around for four to five years now, but its popularity has picked up only in the past two years. And believe it if you can: Korea has a total of an estimated 10 million bloggers! Even if all are not active, that is quite a number.


ISPs encourage the trend by dispatching free blogging services to anyone signing up. The fact that Korean – unlike many other diverse-scripted Asian languages – faces no problems in working with computers that were crafted for the 26-character strong Roman script, does help.


We hear you asking. How do they promote blogging – sometimes seen as a trivial pursuit by young and bored ‘netizens’, who have nothing better to do – among an audience of committed people caught up with the serious business of changing the world?


Says Dalgun: "As a group, Jinbonet encourages organisations and individuals to use blogs." She points at a virtual character – called Jinbone – on the computer screen and explains that Jinbone’s job is to initiate newcomers to blogging in order to make it easier and less challenging.


Her colleague from Jinbonet, ICT policy coordinator Kim Jeong Woo (or PatchA) cannot resist but interrupting: "The character (Jinbone) is her (Dalgun)." An embarrassed Dalgun protests politely. Subtleties of the exchange are lost in the translation.


The virtual character standing at the top right of the blogging page of Jinbonet looks young, friendly, non-threatening and with a we-can-manage-this approach. Probably like Dalgun, when sitting down with a beginner Korean blogger.


"Jinbone is a friendly kind of a person (virtual character). Jinbone provides guidelines on how to blog, and how to manage elements such as trackbacks (an essential concept in blogging) and RSS feeds. So people learn the way of using blogs very easily in the Jimbo blog service," says Dalgun.


APCNews: How successful have the blogs been?


Dalgun is modest in her success. Getting 1700 people from the alternative and campaigning world to write online is no mean task. There are large parts of the globe that may not have so many bloggers altogether, not to mention in their alternative world!


She shrugs, shaking her head, with an it’s-not-for-me-to-say look. When she answers, it’s to say: "We are happy to make many experiments on how to facilitate good communications on the internet, especially she adds, in a people-centric way. Without facilitation, it’s often very hard to get people to express their feelings on the net."


Blogs involve a kind of media that enables easy expression of seemingly personal opinions. Civil society activists tend to express the official opinion of the organisation they take part in, when writing on the group’s website. In blogs, they can express their own views, which may or may not coincide with the official opinion of their organisation. Blogs are therefore a way of creating wider space for expression.


We take a walk down cyberspace, as Dalgun explains some of the blogs’ content -all keyed neatly in Korean-language.


[The Korean language is the official language of both North and South Korea. The language is also spoken widely in neighbouring Yanbian, China. There are around 78 million Korean speakers worldwide, including large groups in the former Soviet Union, Australia, the United States, Canada, China, Brazil, Japan, and the Philippines.]


Posts deal with a range of subjects. Some posts that Dalgun pointed out, referred to the story of a farmer’s school, a letter from prison, and more. "This post is about a person with disability. Here’s one about a person who refused to join the Korean compulsory military service," she says, indicating the tastefully designed orange-white-grey colours of the site.


It runs on the free and open source software-based PHP and a GNU/Linux server. You can find the blogs at http://blog.jinbo.net. A message at the end of the page proudly says, "No copyright, just copyleft."


There’s a trackback card that helps online communities to form easily, and people to link to each other’s posts. "We try to get people to post. Anyone visiting can read other postings, and make comments, or upload some postings with the help of the trackback service. One good facility is that the Jinbonet blog zine picks-up good postings, and places them on the homepage. This acts as a kind of incentive (for people to write more and write better)," explains Dalgun.


Trackback, a mechanism for the communication between blogs, is very helpful too. If a blogger writes a new entry commenting on, or referring to, an post found at another blog, and both blogging tools support the trackback protocol, then the commenting blogger can notify the other blog with a "Trackback ping". The receiving blog will typically display summaries of, and links to, all the commenting entries below the original entry. This allows for conversations spanning several blogs that readers can easily follow.


APCNews: What are the difficulties you face?


"The Korean people tend to be kind of shy, so I think it’s a little difficult for them to express their own opinions, especially in this kind of sphere, on the internet. Our blog service is Jinbo blog, meaning ‘progressive’ blog. So people are sometimes under the pressure to post progressive stories to their blog."


"We want them to upload stories of daily life. But it’s quite difficult sometimes," Dalgun adds. Diversity is another challenge, since most bloggers are in their late 20s to early 30s.


Just before we wind-up, Dalgun comes back with something we forgot to talk about. She tells me: "The personal can be political… in the world of blogs." Sure!

Author: —- (FN)
Contact: fn apc.org
Source: APCNews
Date: 04/26/2006
Location: DHAKA, Bangladesh
Category: Media and Internet


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