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.

A sad story: according to a Dutch newspaper a youngster in South Korea killed his mother over complaining about him being addicted to playing computer games. Then he killed himself. This is another case in an increasing strain of cases involving gaming addiction.

A similar case occurred early 2010 when a man killed his mother over her constant nagging about his computer gaming. Also early 2010, a couple’s baby starved to death because its parents were too busy raising a virtual baby online, according to the Korea Times. This has led to the South Korean government announcing action to curtail people playing computer games or surfing the Internet. Whether this action already took place, I doubt it. I’d be interested to learn about its effectiveness.

Although this seems to make computer gaming a suspect activity, there are millions of people that do not have these problems. Most likely there are some predispositions that make some people more susceptible to acquiring addictions. Anyhow, these cases attract a lot of media attention but maybe statistically not that different from deaths involving watching television or driving a car. Mind you, it is still very sad when people decide to resolve a conflict in the most physical way there is.

I’m not an expert on this matter of addiction. However in the Netherlands you have Jeroen Jansz and Jeroen Lemmens as experts.