The Viral Spread of "Gangnam Style" music video

Psy has won the MTV Europe best music video award and seems headed for further recognition as the YouTube video "Gangnam Style" continues to attract viewers. A simple Google Trends search produces some interesting results that show patterns of attention to the viral video around the world.  For example, as shown in the top graphic on the left (click on graphic for a full size version) there are distinct global peaks in search activity for "Gangnam Style"  on weekends, Saturdays in particular.  Party time!

Google trends also returns a world map as shown below. In the full report, accessible at the Google Trends link below, there is an animation that shows the pattern of how this video spread virally over the past 90 days. Interesting.

Korea: A blind spot in Western accounts of internet and social network history

I've just spent an hour or so looking at timelines on the Web that depict the history of mass media, the history of the internet or the history of social networking. For one example, see the infographic published on Mashable.  Are you surprised to read that not a single one of the dozen or more timelines I found even mentioned Korea's Cyworld, which began operation in 1999, half a decade before the invention of Facebook?  The omission is even more egregious because Cyworld was thriving in South Korea by 2004, with over 22 million users and more than 92 percent of all Koreans in their 20s using the service!
I realize that Korea is not the only Asian country omitted from the many timelines published on the English part of the WWW, but it is a glaring omission because the nation built fast nationwide broadband networks years before other countries caught up. China, which today has the largest population of social media users in the world, also fails to appear in many of these accounts.
The main point of this post:  for readers to remember that the social networking phenomenon, at least measured in terms of public popularity and use, began right here in Korea, not in the Western world.  More on this topic in future posts.

Thinking about "social media" and its role in national development

I've been busy reading and thinking about social media these days in connection with a consulting project for a United Nations Asia Pacific regional center devoted to information and communications technology for development (ICT4D).  The field of development communication, which was my focus in graduate school at Stanford back in the mass media era, has changed a great deal, mainly because of the revolutionary development of the internet and digital communication technology generally.  ICT4D and more recently social media for development are now in vogue, in no small part because of the tremendous hopes for the role that mobile broadband internet via smart phones, tablets and other devices, may play in bolstering socioeconomic development in the poor nations of the world.
On the infrastructure side of things, there is ample reason for optimism since it appears that nearly everyone in the world will have some form of mobile broadband access within a decade.   At the end of 2011, the ITU estimated that over 87 percent of the world's population had mobile phone subscriptions.
However, it is well to remember that there were high hopes in the 1970s that mass media would contribute to national development, and those hopes were never realized.   I'll be following this topic more closely and may post here occasionally.  For those of you interested in following the main issues, I recommend two blogs.
The first is the ICTs for Development blog authored by Richard Heeks of the University of Manchester's Centre for Development Informatics.  To ensure a balanced perspective, I also suggest that you consult the ICT4D Jester blog, written by Kentaro Toyama of U.C. Berkeley.
More on all of this in future posts.

Smartphones, Youth and Addiction

Starting a few years back, South Korea established a pattern of building its broadband networks, both fixed and mobile, years or months ahead of other countries. In the case of the fast new mobile networks, this means that Korean citizens and residents enjoy the fastest, most efficient mobile broadband service in the world.  However, as in the fixed-broadband growth era of the 1990s, it comes at a cost.  One of them is internet addiction, which has rapidly been transformed into smart phone addiction.

As reported in the Korea Joongang Daily, smartphone use among 5-19 year olds increased from just 7.5% at the end of 2010 to 67% in June of this year.  As the bar chart the accompanying graphic shows (click on the graphic to see a full size version), levels of smartphone addiction among children now exceed internet addiction.

The headline of another article in The Joongang Daily is revealing:  "Smartphones cause rifts in families."  Of course they do.  I met earlier this week with a colleague from Korea's ICT sector who mentioned to me that "..all of the kids now have LTE phones."  I have argued elsewhere that the term "smart phone" is a misnomer.   An LTE phone is an internet-connected computer with more capabilities than a typical desktop model.  One needs only imagine the difficulties for parents of guiding their children's use of the internet.  The article is worth reading.    

South Korea still leads the world in ICT development

It's that time of the year again (see my post from last year here).  The ITU has issued the 2012 version of its annual report, Measuring the Information Society.  This report is probably the single most authoritative and comprehensive study aimed at measuring ICT for development, as it is conducted by the ITU on behalf of and with input from all of its member states.
Again this year Korea ranked number one in the world on the ICT Development Index (IDI) aa composite index that combines 11 indicators into a single benchmark measure used to monitor and compare developments in ICT across countries. These indicators are grouped into three sub-indexes corresponding to ICT access, ICT use and ICT skills.
I've reproduced one of the charts from this year's report at the upper left (click on the graphic to see a full size version).   It compares the global distribution of gross national income for selected countries in the world, on the left, with subscribed capacity (a measure of the capacity of fixed, mobile, voice and data telecommunications subscriptions).  In essence, it shows that Korea has huge capacity, relative to its GNI, as shown by the difference in size of the red slices of the pie chart.  Another way of thinking about this is speed.  South Korea has far and away the fastest digital networks in the world.