By Kim Ji-soo
Culture Editor
If the press was once regarded as the fourth estate, it may well be a time for us to give a similar status to the Internet. Its availability, immediacy and the porous nature with which it allowed us to leap over boundaries are the post-modern 21st century human answer to a well informed life. But if the recent case of Minerva is a lesson, it's time for the government to reconsider how to interact with this new partner in power.
Minerva is the now famed Internet economic doomsayer who gripped the nation in the latter part of 2008. Among some hundreds of writings that he posted on the popular Daum's Agora site, he famously predicted the fall of the Lehman Brothers. One columnist noted Agora may have given him room to assert his opinions but it's the media and the government that have turned him into a hero.
The prosecution has indicted and charged unemployed 31-year-old Park Dae-sung, as Minerva, for dispersing false information. Park, in a Dec. 29 article posted on Agora site, said that government officials wrote a letter to local bankers to persuade them not to buy dollars to deter a further slide of the won. It later became known that the government did ask the banks to refrain from buying the dollar around that time, but they did not issue a letter.
But Minerva's posting, prosecutors said, prompted a destabilization of the foreign exchange market, forcing the government to intervene. Conservative monthly magazine Shindongah recently asserted in its latest edition that Minerva referred to a group of seven people working at financial firms. Both parties claim that they are the real Minerva, the Internet economic prophet.
Prosecutors say they have the real Minerva while Shindongah's Minerva suggests that their IP address could have been stolen. Who are we to believe? The prosecution said they have no plans to expand the investigation to verify the claims of Shindongah's Minerva.
Public opinion on the Internet has always had a powerful lure. One of the critical suggestions, that the disgraced stem-cell scientist Hwang Woo-suk did not create a patient-specific stem cell by cloning, was posted in cyberspace by the Biological Research Information Center (BRIC), which provides online news on scientific trends and careers primarily for young researchers.
The tip from BRIC eventually led Hwang to admit to fabrication. Last year's frenzy about the safety of U.S. beef imports grew exponentially through debates on Agora. But experts point out that Internet started to have growing sway from the 2002 presidential election, through which the former President Roh Moo-hyun was voted into office.
An active cyberspace is good in that more people are willingly becoming more participatory. Their enlarged sense of civic participation may well illustrate proactive membership of 21st century civil society. But then again, the anonymity is the other side of the coin to eat into this positive side. Korean cyberspace has been explosive ― it was a more upgraded face to the people power that toppled former military-turned-autocrats in the late 1980s.
Likewise, we need a more nuanced and mature attitude toward cyberspace and what goes on it. Much of Minerva's appeal may have been possible because of President Lee Myung-bak's sense of timing. Since coming to office, one of his traits seems to be sitting on problems rather than tackling them. It showed in his dealings with candlelit rallies over U.S. beef, the ire he brought on the Buddhists and, lately, the global economic downturn.
Critics believe that government could have addressed Minerva's claims earlier on in a methodical, facts-based way. While calling on the press to refrain from calling the current situation an economic ``crisis,'' not much seems to have been done to address Minerva's ``force'' until the prosecution decided to pounce on the guy to arrest and indict him.
Such behavior does not inspire trust in the government and raises doubts about its respect for freedom of expression.
Also, the accrued lessons from cyberspace should remind ``netizens" to consider their written word as their spoken word.