Why is the net-revolution in South Korea so advanced? That's a story that no one has fully explained yet. And the answer to the story is important, as we ponder what changes we might be able to unleash here in the US. The founder of OhmyNews, Oh Yeon Ho, gave a speech at the Berkman Center's "Votes, Bits and Bytes" conference last week that you can read here. While certain factors are obviously important--the dominant media was uniformly conservative and overbearing; the country leads the world in broadband penetration at 75%, making interactive news more viable [the US is falling behind rapidly]; it's relatively small and homogenous so stories can spread and permeate quickly--the most important reason is cultural. Oh's remarks on that point deserve careful consideration:
How did Korea get such active netizens? It didn’t come easily. We Koreans have been paying dearly, since modern Korean history itself is the cost. Struggling against military dictatorship to achieve democracy was the cost. Living in a divided nation is the cost. The Korean War in 1950, and The Kwangju Massacre in 1980 [where over 2000 workers and students were killed while protesting a military coup--with the tacit approval of the Carter Administration, by the way--MLS] were the two representative events that Koreans paid in blood.
The Korean War taught people to keep silent in order to survive. The Kwangju Massacre too. But there has been an endless struggle for democracy and liberating form keeping silent. During the 1980s, university students stood on the street yelling "perish military dictatorship, unveil the truth about the Kwangju Massacre." Some, including me, served in jail or made the uneasy decision to sacrifice future job prospects by demonstrating. We can call them the children of the Kwangju Massacre.
These historical experiences are the deep-rooted background of today's active Korean netizens. Now the children of Kwangju are making their voices heard in cyberspace instead of on the street. Married, with children, they still have their enthusiasm: “If we participate, we can make a difference.”
They are teaching the next generation to remember modern history, and to struggle for a more vibrant democracy.
The positive effects are incalculable. Participatory democracy is flourishing.
Here, I would stress this: technology itself cannot change society, only prepared people who can use technology positively can change society more democratic.
While American society and government has suffered several shocks to the system in the last decade or so (Perot, money-in-politics scandalorama, Clinton's impeachment, Florida 2000, 9-11, Enron, and Bush's rush to war in Iraq all go on my personal list, but if you were thinking like a "righteous" voter you'd probably list abortion, Janet Jackson and gay marriage on your list), they don't produce a critical mass for change--they produce several critical masses pushing in different directions.
Personally, I think what unites us is greater than what divides us--but I also understand that culture can trump economics in how people decide their own self-interest (as much as I love and agree with Tom Frank), and thus we may have a lot of difficulty aligning the great many-to-many against the tiny, greedy few.
Rambling thoughts on a cold Friday morn...
Perhaps the biggest victory by a third party in recent American politics just happened yesterday, when the NY State Senate over-rode Governor Pataki's veto of a bill increasing the state minimum wage to $7.15 an hour by 2007. Much of the muscle and all of the impetus for the change came from the Working Families Party, which had made the wage fight its top priority since it was founded six years ago. The party and its activists tirelessly targeted vulnerable Republican legislators (registered Dems do outnumber Reps by 2-1 in New York, after all), and pushed state Democrats into, for once, standing up for progressive values instead of constantly sliding to the right.
I like the way Dan Cantor, the party's executive director (and, full disclosure, a friend of mine) framed the victory: "It's a pretty good day for about a million people in the state who will have better food, be able to pay their rent, spend a little time with their children. These are family values."
And he has a good way of rebutting rightwing arguments that the modest increase will reduce the state's competitiveness and cost jobs. "The right wing says this any time there's any kind of societal improvement," he said. "To their way of thinking, slavery would produce full employment. ... We can't afford not to pay decent wages. It's a reflection of what kind of society we are trying to build."
I'm not a total fan of the WFP (it cleaves too closely to top state Democrats; its core institutions--the CWA, the UAW and ACORN, along with several other labor unions and Citizen Action--dominate its inner life, rather than its members and chapters; and it has played more of an inside game than one designed to reach the general public with an alternative vision of politics). And I certainly didn't care for its endorsement of my local state senator, Nick Spano, a Republican stalwart, over an upstart Democrat named Andrea Stewart-Cousins, because the party felt it had to reward Spano's vote for the minimum wage hike--even though he is terrible on other issues and Stewart-Cousins is a stand-out. Their race has gone into extra innings, with a judge overseeing a recount. The margin is about 100 votes, and Spano got about 1500 on the WFP's line. (Cantor said that winning the minimum wage increase, which will benefit an estimated 700,000 New Yorkers directly, and probably boost the incomes of another 500,000, outweighed the prospects of unseating one more Republican senator--but the instrumentalism of the choice irked me and other locals.)
But save all that for another day. What the WFP and its hardworking activists accomplished yesterday in raising the state minimum wage is a hopeful sign in otherwise gloomy times. Kudos.