How Korea has become world’s most wired country

People surf the Internet at an information center of Korea Telecom in this 1996 file photo. Korea has become one of the world’s most wired countries since mobile communications were first introduced to the nation in 1961.

/ Korea Times

By Andrei Lankov

Nowadays, Korea prides itself on being one of the world’s most wired countries. This pride is well founded: in June 2010, 39.4 million Koreans or 81.1 percent of the total population were Internet users.

Especially advanced was Korean broadband. According to a recent OECD report, in December 2009 the share of broadband subscribers to the total population reached 33.5 percent. This is slightly below the 37.1 percent level of the Netherlands, the world’s most wired country at the time, but well above the levels of the U.S. and Japan (26.4 percent and 24.8 percent, respectively). It also means that for all practical purposes every Korean household has broadband access nowadays.

Mobile phones are another ubiquitous feature of Korean life. Actually, in September 2010 the number of mobile phones operating in Korea reached 50.05 million, thus slightly exceeding the total population of the country. In technical terms it means that the “penetration rate” had reached the 100 percent level.

Speaking of history, mobile communications were first introduced to Korea in 1961 when cars of top officials were equipped with car phones. The connection was made through a manual switchboard, and, needless to say, this system remained closed to the public.

Public mobile services appeared in Korea in 1984, shortly after the first commercial cellular phone services became available in the United States (1978). However, very few people were able to pay the exorbitant prices at the time, so the number of subscribers grew slowly, increasing from a mere 2,600 in 1984 to some 160,000 in 1991.

So, perhaps the real history of mobile communications in Korea began with the arrival of pagers in the early 1990s. These small gadgets with LCD screens could display short text messages or the phone numbers of callers. For a time virtually every adult Korean kept a pager (known as “beeper” or “bbee-bbee”) in their pocket. By 1997, when the popularity of beepers reached its peak, 30.1 percent of Koreans were subscribers to a paging service. Of all countries, only in Singapore was the paging device more popular.

However, the age of the “bbee-bbee” was short. Cute and cheap and convenient as they were, they were able to compete with mobiles only so long as the latter remained too expensive for the average citizen.

In 1997, the monopoly of KMT, now SK, the only mobile service provider then was broken. By the end of 1997 there were five fiercely competing providers, and the competition led to a dramatic drop in prices. Mobile phones became affordable for the man-in-the-street. In 1994 there were 960,000 mobile subscribers in Korea. By 1998 their number increased thirteen-fold and had reached twelve million, and by 2002 there were 30 million mobile subscribers in Korea.

The mobile phone has become such a common accessory that few adult Koreans imagine they could survive without one. In a poll 78 percent of subscribers reported that they had taken a call while in the toilet.

Anthropologists even advanced a theory by way of explanation for this boom ― with few parallels elsewhere. One reason may be that Koreans spend an unusually large part of their life commuting to and from work. The traditional Korean aversion to fixed schedules is also seen as a contributing factor. Mobile phones allow people to adjust to ever-changing plans and timetables.

In 1982, around the time when mobile phones first appeared in the handbags of the well-to-do Korean, the Korean Internet was born as well. In 1982 a computer in the Computer Science Department at Seoul National University was connected to a computer in the Institute of Electronic Technology. In 1986 Korea acquired its top level domain, .kr.

Like many other countries, Korea did not move to the World Wide Web immediately. During the decade 1985-1995 individual computer users in Korea seldom had access to the global network and used nationwide networks instead. There were three such networks by the mid-1990s: Hitel, Chollian and Now Nuri. These nation-wide networks, sort of Korea-wide intranets, came to be known as “PC communication” or PC tongsin in Korea.

Connection to those early networks was through dial-up modems plugged into the phone outlet. The modem speed was painfully slow by our present standards, with a 14 kbps dial-up modem being the norm in 1994-95 (but such speed was achievable only in Seoul and some other major cities, with 2-3 kbps being more common in the countryside).

The “real” global Internet, the mighty World Wide Web, arrived in Korea in 1994 when the local “PC communication” networks began to provide connection to the WWW for a hefty additional fee. Around 1996 a direct connection to the World Wide Web became the norm, pushing the old nationwide networks into oblivion.

In the late 1990s, Korea became one of the first countries to switch from dial-up modems to broadband. The first broadband services for the average householder became available in 1998, and the number of broadband connections exploded, reaching 11.9 million in 2004. This made Korea the world’s most wired nation – the title which it holds up to this day.

During the period in which broadband connection was not available in most homes, the ubiquitous internet cafes, known as “PC bangs,” flourished across the country. These places soon became major centers for online computer gaming, a favorite pastime for Korean teenagers from the late 1990s onwards. Much to the surprise of market analysts, the PC bang industry survived the mass switch to broadband, so in 2008 the number nationwide reached some 22,000. Those places became an important part of Korea’s youth culture.

The omnipresence of the Internet changed the nature of Korean politics: the powerful network created hitherto unthinkable possibilities for political mobilization. With the Internet and mobile phones, a large-scale public rally could be arranged in days, without the need to use the cumbersome traditional mechanisms of political parties. A single-issue movement could be started almost immediately by a small group of dedicated supporters without connections or funds. This is the case in many countries, of course, but in few other places are these peculiarities of on-line politics as pronounced as in Korea.

Due to Korean political demographics, it was largely the supporters of the nationalist left who made the most of these new trends. In Korea, people in their 20s and 30s (as well as 40s) tend to be left-leaning as well as nationalist, and they also make up the bulk of active Internet users. So, the Internet was embraced by them. This was first shown in 2002 when the tragic death of two Korean girls killed by a U.S. military vehicle was skillfully used by the Roh Moo-hyun’s electoral strategists and helped to make him president. Roh’s campaign relied heavily on politicized Internet users, known in Korea as “netizens.”

Another example of a successful mass mobilization were the “mad cow rallies” of 2008, when rumors about the alleged threat constituted by imported U.S. beef spread through the net at lightning speed. The resultant rallies were the largest in Korea’s modern history, with some half million participants.

The right whose supporters were late to catch up with the new technology, often talk about “digital populism.” However, the Internet-ization of Korean politics is a double-edged sword, and the new opportunities can ― and will ― be exploited by people of all political persuasions. The new democracy might look messy at times, and often is easily hijacked by demagogues. Nonetheless, the same concerns can be expressed about offline democracy as well. A functioning democracy is bound to look messy sometimes ― it is a part of its nature.

Alas, this newly arrived online democracy has a nasty side, too. The recent few years saw a number of spontaneous campaigns when netizens were united in their condemnation of individuals who committed real or alleged misdeeds. Sometimes the ire can be directed against accidental targets ― like a drunken woman who killed a neighbor’s cat in front of a CCTV camera, or a girl student who refused to clean up her dog’s poop in a subway and was photographed on a mobile phone. Both culprits were then exposed to millions of angry netizens, their identity being revealed to the public.

Alas, the victim might be a celebrity who did something not to his or her fans’ liking. For example, in 2008 Ahn Jae-hwan, an actor and businessman, became the target of massive smear campaign and boycotts when his wife, also a prominent actor, dared to challenge the netizens’ belief in the “deadly nature of US beef.” He soon committed suicide, and there is little doubt that the “collective netizen” was to a certain extent responsible for his tragic decision.

At any rate, it is quite possible that Korea, the world’s most wired country, gives us a glimpse of our wired future. And this future is not going to be perfect, but it will be, perhaps, a bit better than present ― on balance, that is.

Prof. Andrei Lankov was born in St. Petersburg, Russia, and now teaches at Kookmin University in Seoul. He can be reached at anlankov@yahoo.com.