These last few weeks, North Korea and South Korea received a lot of media attention. Most of it was related to Kim Jong-il’s death and his succession by Kim Jong-un. Also, South Korea’s concern about the political instability got the attention of the press.
For us in the Netherlands it is relatively easy to access information about North Korea, i.e. when you know the language, which is one of the hardest to learn by the way.
However, when in South Korea, it is not possible to directly access many North Korean websites. Yes, they have websites, but they are mostly hosted in China or Japan.
When you try to access some of these websites anyway from within South Korea, you are directed to a warning from the Korean Communications Standards Commission (KRKC). See the screen shot I took some time ago.

The reason for this post was that apparently a South Korean was arrested for tweeting “Long live Kim Jong-il”. Then again, Homeland security apparently denied two Britons access to the US who tweeted to “destroy America”. Of course, in both cases, especially when you know about these that’s not a clever thing to say or tweet.

For further information on freedom in general and freedom on the Net, check out the Freedom House site.

Asian Journal of Communication just published a manuscript written by Yon Soo Lim, Han Woo Park and me, titled Mediated relations: new methods to study online social capital. This article is part of the AJC special issue Online Social Capital and Participation in Asia-Pacific, guest edited by Marko Skoric (Nanyang Technological University, Singapore).

This is the abstract:
The Web has expanded the research agenda for communication scholars to study social capital. In this field of Internet studies, new indicators of social behavior and social relations have surfaced to describe and understand how social capital develops online and what the consequences are for social capital in general. Specifically, Web 2.0 as characterized by User Generated Content on weblogs and the enormously popular social network sites significantly increased the impor-tance of studying online social capital. To study online social capital, traditional
and new means of data collection and analysis can be used. This study focuses on the origins of the concept of social capital, how it is used in communication studies, and the means to measure social capital. Furthermore, two examples of studying online behavior and online social relations are provided to represent webometric tools for data collection and analysis: (1) the analysis of hyperlinks between political actors’ websites in South Korea, and (2) semantic network analysis of writings produced by professional journalists online and bloggers in South Korea. These examples use advanced analytical methods (hyperlink network analysis and semantic network analysis) to understand the online practices.

For the full article follow this link

Just a few moment ago I wanted to upload a video to YouTube for a blog post. In the screenshot you’ll see what I encountered (i.e. in the green frame).

Yes, that’s right, real name verification. It is a requirement for all websites with an average daily viewership of 100.000 and more,  only allowing users to upload their content (UserGenerated Content UGC) when they provide their real name. In my case that would be my name and my alien registration number as provided to me by the Korean immigration office. This way it is always possible to track down who has said what on the Internet. In this case I can solve this easily by chanching the location. Then again the video, which is harmless, most likely will not be available in South Korea.

One Korean guy that had to learn the hard way was Park Dae-Sung a.k.a. Minerva, blogging about the financial credit crisis. Read the story in Wired. This goes to show that freedom of speech is still an issue in South Korea.