I found another examination of in the Internet’s role in the current meat furor cum presidential protest currently happening in South Korea. This comes from the Korea IT Times  and uses the term flash mob, which has an entry on Wikipedia, to describe the gatherings. I’d call it something else, but more on that later.

This reporter first encountered the new power of the Internet when speaking to the children of a Korean friend. When asked why they looked so sad, the children looked like they were almost going to cry. They said their president, Lee Myung-bak, had doomed the entire Korean people. When asked for details, the two children, approximately 12 years of age, detailed that their president was going to import 30-month old American beef, which was at high risk of carrying mad cow disease.

I never saw anything like a little girl crying on the street  but my wife came home from work all fired up saying she didn’t want to eat any beef for a while. I flipped on the news and sure enough, there it was.

This diseased beef would be sold in supermarkets and eaten by innocent Koreans such as themselves, who would then get Creutzfeldt- Jakob’s Disease (CJD). These Koreans would get it because they had a genetic susceptibility to the disease due to their unique genetic heredity. It would be contagious, pass through the population, and everyone would eventually die from it. The entire Korean race was going to die. Evil American beef exporters did not care, President Lee Myung-bak did not care, and shifty Korean beef importers could not be trusted to correctly label their beef. Or, actually, they could be trusted to mislabel cheap American beef as Korean or Australian to make a profit. Additionally, the child emphasized, Americans did not even eat 30 month old beef, so Koreans were going to die by eating America’s rejected meat.

Then they explained that there was no cure for Mad Cow Disease, it was certain death after being contracted, and the death was painful. Being a little stunned by hearing the potent mix of current event fact and malicious fiction from these students, I asked where they had got all this information from. From the Internet, of course, they said. From Daum, a popular Korean Internet search engine and portal site. When asked if they believed it, they said, “Of course, it was on the Internet.” They were asked if their friends had also heard about that news, and they nodded emphatically. They also said that their friends told of something more sinister they had read on the Internet, which was that Korea was doomed to be destroyed according to an ancient prophecy.

There’s not much more that will get  Koreans fired up about  something than suggesting their sovereignty, let alone their race, will become extinct. For me, this was the most objectionable part of this  whole deal. My good friend from University,  a  PhD in the biological sciences, who recently came to Korea to  teach science at a  major Korean university, became very interested in this aspect of the rumors. According to him there’s not even enough information even available to the public to make a valid judgement on the susceptibility of the Korean race to mad cow disease.

Of course this aspect is lost nowadays and the focus has become something entirely different, as if the start of the protest and its current state are two unrelated events.  I guess the main reason I’ve decided to start posting about this is so that people reading it don’t lose sight of some of the absolute wackiness that kicked all this off. I said in my last post that while I agree in part with what people are currently upset about, the orgins  can’t be neglected.

However, in Korea, things instead took a surprising turn into protests and violence. On May 2nd, 10,000 Korean protesters showed up in the center of Seoul to hold a candlelight vigil in opposition to resuming US beef imports. An online petition calling for the impeachment of the Korean President had reached 600,000 signatures by that time. The entire month of May was full of US beef import controversy. Korean university, high school, and middle school students were the majority involved in the protests, which may mark this as the comingof- age event for an entire new generation of Korean protestors. One bombastic student got up onto a stage at a protest in downtown Seoul, the capital of democratic South Korea, and said “Has the United States taken everything from us? It seems North Korea’s Kim Jong-il is stronger. Wouldn’t it be better to stand up to the United States like North Korea? ‘Doing it our own way.’ Doesn’t that sound nice?”

The reason I disagree with the tern flash mob is that the term makes it sound spontaneous. I think the reaction  has been  somewhat spontaneous and the numbers of people are uncontrollable, but there’s no doubt in my mind that the rumors were planted by someone with a larger cause in mind. For better or for worse, it worked.

There have been accusations by the right-wing conservative government that left-wing losers in the recent election have been stirring up the people. However, ring leaders or protest organizers have yet to be found.

Since when are people using the Internet to plant rumors, hack, file share, or trade child pornography found? Sure, it happens, but not often.

Instead, most participants say that the protest formation is spontaneous and leaderless, with advertisements and requests for volunteers going up on popular portal sites like Daum and Naver.

As opposed to saying where the rumors originated from?

Images of bleeding protestors and police using water cannons against aged protestors have quickly appeared on Daum’s Agora Web site. The protestors are now saying that US beef is no longer the only issue. Some say that the indifference of Lee Myung-bak, who was elected in the largest landslide in Korean democratic history just three months ago, is the larger issue now. There are rumors that the President will let go some of his cabinet as a sacrifice in an attempt to appease the flash mobs. At the time of writing, it is not sure what the outcome will be, but what is sure is that the Internet, as a connecting and communicating force beyond any other, has enabled the quick and efficient organization and sustainability of this month-long protest. And perhaps only the Internet can put it to rest.

That’s the end of the story, and I think there’s some truth in that last line. If I had to bet money I’d say a minor adjustment will be made to the deal allowing Koreans to feel they made their point — and it will have been made. Lee Myung-bak will think twice  before he  tries to  Bulldoze his way through the public again.  

But there’s still a lot of room for something much more unpredictable to happen. Maybe the protestors will start blasting the Mighty Mouse theme and Kim Jong-il will fly down out of the sky.

(Article via Marmot)