One service I’m thinking readers need is more extended quotes from obscure or pay wall-protected publications. It’s my way of forcing media reform, one link at a time. Really, I’d like a kickass local paper, full of muckraking journalists I can depend on to grill officials and CEOs. So. let me kill two birds with one stone.

Evgeny Morozov gets South Korean netizens, and amazingly Clay Shirky doesn’t

The South Korean example is worth discussing in detail because it highlights how easy it is to draw misleading conclusions from anecdotes.

For more than a month between May and June 2008, the streets of Seoul brimmed with tens of thousands of angry people, unhappy that newly elected president Lee Myung-Bak had lifted a five-year ban on imports of American beef. Many South Koreans felt that the ban, originally imposed because of fears of mad cow disease, had been rescinded too hastily, giving public safety a back seat to the exigencies of foreign policy.

So they took to Seoul’s parks and public squares and mounted candlelight vigils and sang “No to mad cow!” By late June, their efforts paid off: the president was forced to apologize on national television, reshuffle his cabinet, and add a few extra restrictions to the trade agreement.

Shirky zeroes in on the high-school students—most of them girls—who spearheaded the protests. He is particularly impressed to report that they learned about the ban through postings on an Internet forum dedicated to their favorite boy band. “Massed together, frightened and angry that Lee’s government had agreed to what seemed a national humiliation and a threat to public health, the girls decided to do something about it,” Shirky writes, pointing out that the band’s Web site “provided a place and a reason for Korea’s youth to gather together by the hundreds of thousands.”

For Shirky, this suggests nothing less than a revolution in revolution-making: “When teenage girls can help organize events that unnerve national governments, without needing professional organization or organizers to get the ball rolling, we are in new territory.” He uses the story to illustrate the limitations of the South Korean media in fostering such revolutionary pursuits: a similar protest would have been unimaginable in the sitcom age.

Shirky says he is writing about Western democracies, but they are unrecognizable in his book, for they appear to have been sterilized completely of social conflict.

The media, he contends, were passive, as was their audience: “a large number of mostly uncoordinated amateur media consumers.” Meanwhile anything posted on the band’s site “was as widely and publicly available as any article in a Korean newspaper, and more available than much of what was on TV.” The girls “weren’t silent consumers but noisy producers themselves, able to both respond to and redistribute those messages at will”; as a result, “connected South Korean citizens, even thirteen-year-olds, radicalized one another” and were able to shake a government “used to a high degree of freedom from public oversight.”

But before the tale of candle-holding South Korean high schoolers forcing ministers to resign joins the Belarus myth, it might pay to look a little more carefully at what happened.

Discontent with Lee had been brewing before he lifted the ban, especially among students. One of his most controversial ideas involved a radical change to the country’s education system, which would have made English the language of instruction in most high schools. The candlelight protests also were not a novelty: the country went through a similar phase in 2002, when two girls were killed by a vehicle belonging to U.S. forces stationed in the country. Protests are common in South Korea, with about 11,000 annually.

erhaps because of his scorn for the professional media, Shirky misses what may have been the real cause of the protests: a television report, provocatively titled “Is American Beef Really Safe from Mad Cow Disease?” that aired on PD Notebook, a current affairs program on the popular channel MBC. According to that program, a woman in Virginia recently had died from mad cow disease, the South Korean government had surrendered its sovereignty, South Koreans were genetically predisposed to the disease, and the disease could spread through the powdered soup base in instant noodles.

Shirky never mentions the TV show, nor does he say anything about the role of Korean celebrities in mobilizing the masses (a well-known actress claimed she would rather drink acid than eat American beef). Videos of the MBC broadcast did go viral online, and this “rebroadcast” played a role in getting people onto the streets. Still, rather than a triumph of the digital public sphere, the story of the high school protesters ultimately is an example of old-media alarmism spread with a little help from new-media friends.

The problem isn’t just that Shirky overlooks some facts. His central narrative—people vs. corrupt and irresponsible government—blinds him to the ambiguous implications of that mix of free time and Internet access that he celebrates as “cognitive surplus.” Yes, South Korea is prosperous and wired. But it still harbors numerous social ills that information technology may aggravate.

Shirky ignores South Korea’s epidemic of Internet addiction, from which 2 million residents (4 percent of the population) reportedly suffer. (Remember the South Korean couple that let their three-month-old starve to death while they reared their virtual child?) Nor does he mention the growth of xenophobic cyber-vigilante groups that troll social-networking sites in search of evidence that foreigners who come to teach English in the country behave immorally. And Shirky is similarly oblivious to the patriotic netizens who organize cyber-attacks on Japanese Web sites over matters as petty as figure skating. More substantial issues between the two countries—like the future of the disputed Liancourt Rocks islands—result in even greater online vitriol.

Although I’ve rejoined the twitterverse, I’m a bit more sober about its impact, more Morozov than Shirky. I’d like to use my Twitterfeed to reward good journalism. I’m also mindful that time is the enemy, both when there’s too much and too little. The right amount of time, the right amount of pay, and the right amount of critical thinking, though, are in short supply.

Shirky presents a world without nationalism, corruption, religion, extremism, terrorism. It is a world without any elections, and thus no need to worry about informed voters. Class, gender, and race make a few appearances, but not as venues of systemic oppression. They are just more testimony to the mainstream media’s elitism. Describing the media habits of his young students, Shirky remarks that they “have never known a world with only three television channels, a world where the only choice a viewer had in the early evening was which white man was going to read them the news in English.”

But while Shirky seems content to gloss over the deficiencies of democratic politics and declare them transformed, a more sober analyst will realize that the transformation of those politics is far from complete and in fact requires more determined popular engagement. Even in the age of the Internet, the fate of the nation depends on who organizes in the public sphere, who shows up at the voting booth, and how well-informed those people are.

We want to cultivate voters who are less susceptible to propaganda than Shirky’s beloved South Korean teenagers. Very little suggests that we are enjoying greater success in this quest than we did in the golden era of network television. The environment of media scarcity produced voters who, on average, were far less partisan and far better informed about politics than are today’s voters. Yes, this was an accident—viewers had nothing else to watch at 9 p.m.—but the byproducts were valuable.

On a related note, The Economist undercuts the utopian view that television is dead.

People spend more time watching television now than they did when rappers attacked it with songs. As a thorough study by the Council for Research Excellence has shown, Americans spend more time watching television than they spend surfing the web, sending e-mails, watching DVDs, playing computer games, reading newspapers and talking on mobile phones put together. Television is not disappearing. But nor is it the only star in the sky.
In this special report

The internet, both fixed and mobile, poses a growing challenge to television. It lures advertisers with promises of precision: why pay huge sums to scatter a message among millions of people when you can target the few who seem to be interested in your product? To consumers it promises choice, engagement and a low (or no) price. And the internet has powerful backers. Despite all that hand-wringing over the dangers of technology, governments from South Korea to Sweden seem to regard universal fast broadband as a human right, to be paid for out of general taxation.

With the important exception of sport, early attempts to deliver TV content over the web and mobile phones have proved unprofitable. The worst mistakes are now being put right. But it is doubtful that the economics of online or mobile video will ever be as attractive as the economics of traditional television. As video goes online, a world of restricted choice and limited advertising space turns into one where both are available in almost endless quantities. More supply means lower prices.

Technology also competes for attention. Although families still gather around the TV set as they have done for decades, they now bring electronic distractions with them. Nielsen reckons that 13% of people who watched the Academy Awards ceremony this year went online during the programme, up from 9% last year. The multitaskers did not appear to gravitate to entertainment websites. Google and Facebook topped the list of websites visited during the Oscars, just as they did during the Super Bowl and the opening ceremony of the Winter Olympics.

In Japan and South Korea, where many technological trends originate, young people may well type a text message and watch television on their mobile phone even as the main TV set flickers in the background. In Britain teenagers have learned to bounce from platform to platform and from children’s to adult programmes, snacking on a wide range of content. “They have become adept at lightning raids,” says Mark Thompson, the BBC’s director-general. Although teenagers watch a lot of television it has become hard to make programmes specifically for them.

For the biggest TV shows, technology is a boon. Social-networking websites create chatter around reality-TV programmes, increasing awareness and drawing viewers. Television executives have long endeavoured to create “water-cooler” shows which people will talk about at work the next day. Chris Silbermann, president of International Creative Management, a talent agency, says Facebook and Twitter function a bit like large digital water coolers. As audiences fragment, the big shows’ ability to draw huge numbers of eyeballs at a specific time becomes ever more valuable to advertisers.

For shows of middling popularity, including many scripted dramas and comedies, life is harder. Big shows are crowding out smaller ones, partly because of the amplifying effects of social media and partly because of the spread of digital video recorders, which make it easy to watch nothing but hits. Online video nibbles at their audience, too. How to survive in this world of giant competitors and new distractions?

One answer is to involve viewers more in programmes. Television is extremely good at creating characters and gripping stories. It is much less good at encouraging people to engage with those stories. Simon Cowell has proved that people will vote for contestants in talent shows. But some attempts to open a dialogue with viewers have been a little odd. In May 2009 Britain’s Channel 4 aired “Surgery Live”, which sought to involve Facebook and Twitter users in a real-life operation.

So far the most impressive efforts in this direction have been made by TV news outlets. Al-Jazeera, a Qatar-owned broadcaster, has “Minbar Al-Jazeera”, a regular forum for discussion and complaint. CNN has thoroughly integrated social media into its shows, frequently passing e-mailed comments to pundits. It also encourages people to help create stories by uploading pictures and video to its iReport website. This comes into its own after natural disasters like the Haiti earthquake in January, when journalists cannot get to the scene. To protect its brand, CNN distinguishes between pictures and footage that it has vetted as genuine and those it has not.

Involving viewers in this way is crucial for CNN, which lacks the ideological rapport that its two main American rivals, the conservative Fox News Channel and the liberal MSNBC, have with their viewers. But it is desirable for any news outfit. In a country where even subway systems have Facebook pages, news networks must fight to hold onto people’s attention. And ordinary folk want to interact with news. A recent survey by the Pew Research Centre found that 25% of American internet users had commented on online news stories or blogs and 48% had e-mailed links to such stories to others. A surprising 9% had contributed stories or videos to news sites.

So, involve people, but do it the right way. Cowell TV is insipid, but it’s inspirational. It’s more like commenting on a Board than watching Uncle Walter. South Korean excesses show that responsibility is key, and the way to ensure it is to democratize further, but also to make people more discriminating participants, not just passive consumers. I hope South Korean is not the language of a future media.

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Filed under: Education, Korea, Politics, Subscriptions, TV Tagged: clay shirky, evgeny morozov, mad cow protests, media reform, newspapers, South Korea, twitter