President Lee says "We Must Guard Against Infodemics"

In his address to the recently convened National Assembly, President Lee Myung Bak stated that "We must guard against infodemics." President Lee was not the first to use the term "infodemic." A quick Google search shows that it has been used by representatives of international organizations with reference to saturation news coverage of disasters. The Korea Times published a full English-translation of President Lee's speech to the National Assembly. The portion of his speech dealing with "infodemics" went as follows: "An advanced society is characterized by the dominance of rationality and civic virtues. A society rampant with excessive emotional behavior, disorderliness and rudeness cannot be called an advanced society by any measure. In this connection, we have to guard against "infodemics," a phenomenon in which inaccurate, false information is disseminated, prompting social unrest that spread like epidemics. It is about time we began to firmly respect and understand each other better and extend generosity and thoughtfulness to other people. Generosity and thoughtfulness are instrumental to overcoming the age of confrontation and divisiveness and forging ahead with the age of harmony and partnership. society." What President Lee left unsaid, but which is clearly implied by the term "infodemic" is the manner in which information spreads so rapidly via the internet and new mobile networks. This is the "six degrees of separation" phenomenon that is such a powerful factor in South Korea's emerging political culture and was touched on in an earlier post in this blog.

"Where's the Beef?" Information Age Politics in Korea

The candlelight vigil demonstrations against the Lee Myung Bak government's decision to allow importing of American beef began on May 2, have occurred almost daily since then, and show no signs of abating. As time passes, they seem to involve every conceivable political issue on which the new administration of President Lee Myung Bak might be opposed, reminding me of the famous line from a Wendy's commercial in the mid-1980s, "Where's the Beef?" These powerful political developments in Korea can be better understood if we pay attention to several main features, from a political communication perspective.

• The new networks are employed to organize and sustain the political movement. These include mainly messaging with mobile phones and the internet.
• The "six degrees apart" phenomenon allows fast mobilization of large-scale demonstrations, especially in Korea's close-knit culture.
• The use of digital images, graphics and videos is widespread. At the latest candlelight vigils, not only the candles and cups, but placards carried by participants, seem to have been mass produced digitally for each event.
• There is an immediate global aspect to the sharing of videos of the demonstrations that feeds the movement, as each night's vigil becomes a promotion for forthcoming demonstrations. The growing number of videos posted to YouTube in recent days illustrates this global dimension.
• The current flurry of political activity shows a spotlight on the manner in which rumor, half-truths, can be spread via the internet and other modern media. The South Korean press has been full of stories speculating on the origins of some of the rumors and stories circulating on the web and via mobile messaging. Many speculate that the political opposition to Lee Myung Bak's government, or young hackers, and the like are behind the developments.

Six Degrees of Separation: Politics in the Information Age

The current political phenomenon in Korea, involves a mediated frenzy that is being whipped up with the aid of new information an communication technologies, notably the internet and mobile phones. This suggests to me that South Korea, which has internet and mobile communication infrastructures unequalled in the world, also has certain cultural characteristics that accentuate the political impact of these communication technologies.

One of the interesting findings from research on human communication networks is the so-called "six degrees of separation." It refers to the idea that, if a person is one step away from each person he or she knows and two steps away from each person who is known by one of the people he or she knows, then everyone is an average of six "steps" away from each person on Earth. This idea has its origins in the 1960s experiments of American psychologist Stanley Milgram. The concept has since accumulated an impressive amount of empirical evidence or "proof." One of the more interesting studies "proving" the concept was published in June of 2007, based on data from everyone in the world who used the MSN "instant messaging" service. In a research paper from June 2007, titled "Worldwide Buzz: Planetary-Scale Views on an Instant-Messaging Network (PDF)," Eric Horvitz of Microsoft Research and Jure Leskovec of Carnegie Mellon University analyzed 30 billion conversations among 240 million people using Microsoft Instant Messenger in June 2006. It turned out that the average path length, or degree of separation, among the anonymized users probed was 6.6.

The relevance of this to the current political upheaval in South Korea? Politics here are based on interpersonal communication networks. Family, hometown, school and regional associations are of paramount importance in Korea. Modern communication networks such as the internet and mobile phones amplify the speed and scope of interpersonal communication in part because of "six degrees of separation." This phenomenon has also been dubbed "smart mobs." Middle and high school students use mobile-phone-based instant messaging and internet bulletin boards to share ideas about importation of American beef, and to organize candlelight protests that draw tens of thousands in Seoul and other large Korean cities. Korea's homogeneous culture and the importance of networking with friends and associates seems to be creating a strong new political dynamic in the information age. With only six degrees of separation, information spreads more rapidly through the new digital networks, creating candlelight vigils in which sixty percent or more of the participants were reportedly middle and high school students.