"The Fragile Beauty of P2P Movements in South Korea"

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Jointly organized by

Asia Research Institute, Office of Deputy President (Research & Technology) and Faculty of Arts & Social Sciences Cities Cluster ,

National University of Singapore

Not to be Quoted Without Permission from the Author

Workshop on

Asia’s Civil Spheres: New Media, Urban Public Space, Social Movements

29 – 30 September 2011

Institutional Conflicts in the Web 2.0 Era

and the Evolution of Consumer Activism:Korean Candlelight Protests 2008

Yenn LeeCentre for Criminology & Sociology, Royal Holloway, University of London

[email protected]



ASIA’S CIVIL SPHERES: NEW MEDIA, URBAN PUBLIC SPACE, SOCIAL MOVEMENTS (29 - 30 SEPTEMBER 2011)

Jointly organized by Asia Research Institute, Office of Deputy President (Research & Technology) and

Faculty of Arts & Social Sciences Cities Cluster , National University of Singapore

Draft Copy – Not to be Quoted Without Permission from the Author 2

BEEF, CANDLES, AND THE CURIOUS BIRTH OF A MEDIA ACTIVIST NETWORK

On 2 May 2008, a wave of candlelight demonstrations, lasting more than a hundred days, broke out in

South Korea. The demonstrations levelled criticism at the newly elected president Lee Myung-Bak and his

conservative government for lifting the ban on American beef imports (which had been imposed after the

2003 outbreak of mad cow disease in the US) despite public concerns over “the declining credibility of USfood regulation” (Krugman, 2008).

There arose a suspicion that the decision had been brought forward to please Washington. Sealed on 18

April, eleven hours before Lee’s arrival at Camp David (the country retreat of the US President in Maryland)

for his first face-to-face meeting with then US President George W. Bush, the deal lowered standards for

specified risk materials (SRM) for mad cow disease. Indeed, the new standards turned out to be weaker

than those used by the US Department of Agriculture and the World Organization for Animal Health (OIE),

presenting the possibility of importing bovine parts containing SRM, or in other words parts categorised as

“unfit for human consumption in the US”, into the Korean market (The Hankyoreh, 2008).

In response to this, mass protests hit the streets of Seoul and other major cities, encompassing not onlythe ‘usual suspects’ of political participation in the country, that is, men in their 30s and 40s, but also other

sectors of the population previously assumed to be apolitical, such as teenagers (popularly dubbed

“candlelight girls”), women in their early 20s (“high heels squad”), young mums with their toddlers (“buggy

squad”), and Catholic priests (see also Han, 2009; Lee, Kim & Wainwright, 2010). Besides the

unprecedentedly wide appeal of the issue, the protests were also marked by participants’ savvy use of the

Internet and digital gadgets, including high-resolution camera phones, water cannon-resistant camcorders

and WiFi-enabled laptops, for coordinating and live-broadcasting themselves (Han & Rhee, 2008).

Lee Myung-Bak’s victory with a record-high margin in the 17th presidential election in December 2007 was

widely viewed as a restoration of traditional ruling conservatism after the two successive liberal

governments from February 1998 to February 2008. However, the backlash against the beef deal shook theLee administration to the point that the new prime minister and the entire cabinet offered to resign in June

2008, after barely four months in office.

The overall candlelight protests represented a significant shift in the political dynamics of the country and

therefore merit attention in their own right (see also Lee, Kim & Wainwright, 2010), but the present study

focuses on an offshoot network born out of the protests: “the Public Campaign for the Rights of Media

Consumers” (hereafter referred to by its Korean acronym Eonsoju). The discussion is based on

ethnographic observation in and around the Eonsoju network, logging of related news, and a 3-hour face-

to-face interview with 2 representatives of the network (conducted on 21 January 2011 in Seoul).

PERSONALLY COLLECTIVE, COLLECTIVELY PERSONAL

As the wave of candlelight protests developed, the target of the protesters expanded to include the

country’s three dominant conservative newspapers – Chosun Ilbo, JoongAng Ilbo and Dong-A Ilbo, more

commonly referred to by an acronym Chojoongdong – for being explicitly supportive of the government’s

actions.

Chojoongdong together hold more than 70% of the newspaper market share in South Korea. Moreover,

they are now expanding to the broadcasting sector. On the basis of the new media bill passed in the midst

of a “brawl” in the conservative-dominated National Assembly on 22 July 2009 (The BBC, 2009), the

government granted Chojoongdong permission to start cable TV stations for general programming, in

addition to what they already owned (Ramstad, 2011).







Major shareholders of Chojoongdong are closely connected, through marriage ties, with chaebols (large

business conglomerates in Korea, typically owned and controlled by families) and right-wing politicians

(Cho, 2005). As a result, they are known to represent the vested interests of the Korean establishment. In

this context, protesters were angered by the national dailies’ partisan reporting of the issue, especially

because they had vigorously attacked the previous liberal government over the dangers posed by resuming

imports of American beef.

Anti-Chojoongdong movements predate the beef issue and go far back into the 1990s (Han, 2010).

However, what has to be noted here is the change in modus operandi . Media reform activists in earlier

days concentrated on raising public awareness on the country’s distorted media environment and the

nexus between the media troika and the power elite (see also Mills, 1956). Such efforts did not come to

much fruition though because the activists could not match up to Chojoongdong’s resources and

circulation.

In 2008, the so-called Web 2.0 Generation took a ‘smarter’ approach. First, an open group was set up on 31

May on the major portal site Daum (http://cafe.daum.net/stopcjd) initially calling itself “The Public

Campaign for Stopping the Publication of Chojoongdong”

1

. Next, on the group bulletin board, a list of companies that advertised in Chojoongdong was collectively maintained and updated daily. Individual

members and other non-affiliated participants then phoned those advertisers and warned that they would

boycott their products unless the ads were withdrawn. Referring to this activity as “homework”, each

decided whether, when and to whom to call as they saw fit. According to the interviewees, the group grew

rapidly to around 79,000 members at its peak2

and the ad spaces in Chosun Ilbo were reduced to a half

because an increasing number of companies began to pull out as a result of the boycott threat.

The following comment by Interviewee 1, then elected representative3

of Eonsoju, encapsulates what

differentiates Eonsoju from its predecessors.

Interviewee 1:We appreciate [our predecessors’] work. They laid a foundation for what we do now.

However, their limitation was that the activity was almost exclusive for intellectuals and

never for the masses.

[…]

We are different from any other civic groups that have come before us. In the past, civic

groups lacked citizens. Their typical organisation was made of a few intellectuals

representing the cause and a pool of members doing nothing but pay dues. Their projects

were typically initiated by a few permanent staff members, followed by a press

conference. The Citizens’ Coalition for Democratic Media (Mineonryeon) was an example

of this kind of operation. We are different. Everybody does everything. The representative

is also from the within. There are no tiers. […] Members can identify with the causebecause they actually do something, which is rewarding.

‘NEW’ MEDIA GROUNDED IN ‘OLD’ LAW

Unlike earlier endeavours, Eonsoju’s approach indeed proved to be effective and seemingly hit a nerve

with Chojoongdong. The media troika sought legal intervention and, as a result, most of the entries on the

Eonsoju bulletin board were permanently deleted on the advice of the Korea Communications Standards

1Changed to the current name, “the Public Campaign for the Rights of Media Consumers”, on 24 June 2008.

2

As of this writing in September 2011, it has approximately 67,000 members.3

At the time of the interview, his term was coming to a completion and a new representative was elected shortly

after.







Commission4

. Moreover, on 29 August, 24 members holding the administrative responsibilities of the

group were prosecuted. During the investigation, foreign travels bans were imposed on 22 of them (8 July)

and, in some cases, their houses and offices were searched (15 July). In the initial trial in February 2009, all

of the 24 were found guilty of “obstruction of business” and sentenced/fined, though 9 were exonerated in

an appeal in December of the same year. The case is currently pending in the Supreme Court.

Interviewee 2, one of the prosecuted still waiting for the Supreme Court’s ruling, explained the legal

conflicts in further detail.

Interviewee 2:

The charge the prosecution came up with was “joint-principal of conspiracy” (gongmo

gongdong jeongbeom).

Interviewee 1:

As far as I know, it is something only Japan5

and Korea have, in order to put away mafia

bosses, who are usually the kingpins in their criminal enterprises but never actually do or

even conspire.

Interviewee 2:

Let me elaborate on that. The whole thing started in Agora (one of the biggest open-to-all

bulletin boards in Korean cyberspace for debates and e-petitions, operated by Daum). So,

even with the “joint-principal of conspiracy” precedent, the prosecution could not do

anything or they had to arrest all Daum users. A lot of Cafés6

mushroomed at that time. […]

Media-focused ones were later absorbed into us, but there was 82cook.com and also MLB

something, which was some baseball-related Café, et cetera. All of them were doing the

same thing as we were. So, there were no instigators per se. The person who set up the

[Eonsoju] Café wasn’t even the one who had come up with the [boycott] idea in the first

place. The idea was addressed, or rather thrown in, on the Agora bulletin board. We don’teven know who it was. He disappeared. So, to us, our Café space was an extension from

Agora. We didn’t see it any differently. We set the Café up only because posts on the Agora

board were very quickly pushed down, with new posts added constantly. We just wanted

to have an organised archive for easy reference. We didn’t even care who called and who

didn’t. […] Within the Café, there were a few volunteers who would spend their spare time

in clipping relevant news articles et cetera. Those volunteers were called Café Operators7

and the prosecution concluded that they were the masterminds behind the boycott. How

they came up with the “joint-principal of conspiracy” charge was also funny. Otherwise

they had nothing on us, really. “Obstruction of business” could be applied only to those

who actually made phone calls to the advertisers. The court ruled that the act of

expressing one’s opinion itself is not a punishable crime. Only swearing, threatening,repeated calls, and long calls are. But how were they going to single out problematic

callers? They could have, but in order to prosecute the so-called “leadership” of the Café

instead, they did not go after any of those who might have threatened or sworn during

their boycott calls anyway.

4For more information on Internet filtering and censorship in Korea, see Lee (2011).

5See also Coulson, 2008.

6Online groups set up on Daum are called Daum Cafés.

7With a resonance to system operators, or ‘sysops’, of BBSs.







CYBER-EXILE AND FORCED TRANSFORMATION

In response to the legal pressure, boycott supporters first created a publicly accessible Google-based

document in a bid to replace the original bulletin board on Daum and circumvent the Korean restrictions.

This move gave rise to the newly coined term “cyber-exile” in the media (see also Lee & Park, 2010).

The following Figure 1 is a screenshot of the Google document (captured on 4 July 2008). The motivation to

create this document was clearly articulated at the bottom of the image (in red). It goes: “This is a

document simply listing advertisers of a certain media house. No entities in Korea shall have a legal ground

to request the global corporation Google to have it deleted or limited”.

Figure 1. “Database of lists of Chojoongdong advertisers”

(https://spreadsheets.google.com/pub?key=p_s9QsQy5_QA3sxgdNKGnbA)

With the legal pressure mounting, however, Eonsoju was compelled to find a more systematic solution

than circumvention. After internal deliberation, it decided to officially register as an NGO on 30 August.

The rationale was, in the words of Interviewee 1, that they “needed money and structure in order to fight

the battles in the court”.

Noteworthy is that, instead of full transformation, it restructured itself into a two-pronged organisation,

composed of the informal network nested on the portal Daum and the registered NGO. On the NGO front,

it operates and raises funds in a more conventional manner. For a financial independence, approximately

1,000 members of the NGO pay monthly dues, the total of which amounts to 10 million KRW (around 8,990

US dollars). In return, the dues-paying members are entitled to vote or run in any internal elections. The

funds raised from this, together with ad-hoc donations, have mainly been used for legal fees and court

case related expenses.

As mentioned in the interview excerpt above, the original network does not have a defined leadership,

other than a few volunteers (i.e. a Café Master and Café Operators) facilitating its operation. On the otherhand, the NGO has a centralised organisation; it has one elected director and a central committee

consisting of regional managers.







Changes had to take place not only at the structural level but also at the operational level. The dilemma

Eonsoju faced after the 24 members found guilty in the first trial in February 2009 was whether to ignore

the court’s ruling and carry on or to find another way that remained legal. They chose the latter to avoid

the risk of putting participants off. As Interviewee 1 put it, in order to keep the mass appeal, “[action

repertoires] have to be legal, comfortable and easy”.

The court did not see the act of boycotting itself as an offence, but the telephone activity withered away

nevertheless because of the external pressure from the prosecution and the consequent reluctance among

some members. Eonsoju then decided to ally with other NGOs with similar goals and carry out the boycott

in a more traditional fashion. It now selects to target one advertiser at a time, on the basis of internal

deliberation led by the central members. It then publicly communicates the development of the boycott,

through press conferences among other means, instead of a phone bombardment. In other words, it now

more resembles the earlier models of activism.

The first subject of this approach was the major pharmaceutical company Kwang Dong. Eonsoju announced

its intention to boycott it on 8 June 2009, endorsed by about 600 other civic and social groups (Kim, 2009).

It explained its rationale that the company focused its advertising in Chojoongdong. Within a day after thisannouncement was made, the pharmaceutical company offered, as a compromise solution, to buy ad

spaces in other smaller and more left-leaning newspapers. Then representative of Eonsoju accepted this

offer as a “triumph”, but it gave rise to debates over whether the outcome actually fit with the goals and

objectives of the organisation. Moreover, this approach did not keep the organisation away from legal

complications either. For example, the former representative who was involved in the negotiation with

Kwang Dong was later charged with extortion and his case is now appealed to the Supreme Court.

THE FRAGILE BEAUTY OF P2P MOVEMENTS

Eonsoju is not the first but an epitomising example of Bauwens’ definition of “peer to peer (P2P)”, which is“a specific form of relational dynamic, […] based on the assumed equipotency of its participants [and]

organized through the free cooperation of equals in view of performance of a common task, for the

creation of a common good” (2005: 6). He theorises that P2P is a trend going beyond computer technology

(e.g. Napster-like file sharing) and occurring “isomorphically” across all areas of social and cultural life in

contemporary society (2005: 48).

In a similar but more specific vein, journalist and anti-corporate globalisation activist Klein has positively

discussed a new breed of political movement that came to international attention after the protest activity

surrounding the WTO Ministerial Conference of 1999 in Seattle. Her argument is that today’s movements

are not only facilitated by the Internet at the logistical level but also take a form which “mirrors the organic,

decentralised, interlinked pathways of the Internet” itself (Klein, 2000b). To put it another way, the

strength of such movements lies in the fact that they have “no central leadership or command structure”

and are therefore “multi-headed, impossible to decapitate” (RAND, cited in Klein, 2000a).

Since the early 2000s, Korea has seen interesting developments in the adoption of P2P for political

mobilisation. Among better-known examples is Nosamo, a grassroots campaign effort key to the victory of

the relatively weaker candidate Roh Moo-Hyun in the 2002 presidential election. In an interview conducted

in 2006 (Lee, 2009b: 170), a member of Nosamo stated:

[Some say Nosamo should have been disbanded after Roh’s victory, but] what outsiders

don’t get is the nature of Nosamo. It is not an organisation but a peer-to-peer network. All

decisions are up to each individual. It is a network of autonomous individuals. So, if you are

not happy, you can simply leave the network. Let’s say we agree to break up now. Anyone

can resume it anytime anywhere else. […] It’s meaningless to talk about disbandment.

Members know better than that.







This certainly resonates with what the two interviewees in the present study said about Eonsoju, especially

its individualised leadership, intermittent involvement/commitment, and under-politicised action

repertoires. However, despite its significant political potential demonstrated, the Eonsoju case also

illustrates how “fragile” P2P organising can be vis-à-vis legal and other institutional forces (see also Etling,

Faris & Palfry, 2010). Potential is not something to be easily gauged, but on the basis of how boycott

campaigns of a similar nature have flourished in other social contexts, one can attempt an educated guess.The interviewees, for example, pointed to the Fox News Boycott (FNB, http://foxnewsboycott.com/)

running active in the US as a precedent, in order to contest the constitutionality of the charges restricting

their consumer rights (see also Ahn, 2008). Another, more recent example of a boycott of the same kind

with a different destiny was one organised through Facebook and Twitter in protest against the News of

the World phone-hacking scandal in the UK in the summer of 2011, which is believed to have contributed

to the eventual shutdown of the newspaper (Knight, 2011).

Eonsoju has been quick to respond to external threats and internal demands. The ‘legally smart mob’ of

Eonsoju first appropriated a global service, Google Docs, to circumvent the KCSC’s monitoring of the

bulletin board on the domestic portal site. This informal consumer network then later transformed itself

into a formal civic organisation, a decision compelled by legal pressures. In other words, its skin-changingevolution was interesting and even impressive, but giving up its inherent horizontality and flexibility was

not a matter of choice but of survival.

With recently leaked diplomatic cables8

8

e.g. “The [US] Ambassador explained that some clarifications were needed to the KORUS FTA chapters on labor and

environment, but that the clarifications would in no way change the balance of the agreement. He added he hoped

Korea would ratify the FTA before the December election. [GNP presidential front-runner] Lee [Myung-Bak] agreed

that the FTA should be ratified, but noted that if the ratification process were too close to the December election,

anti-American, anti-FTA sentiment could become an election issue. Former Mayor Lee noted he was concerned the

U.S. ratification process might be delayed until 2008. Lee cautioned that while most GNP lawmakers were pro-FTA,

even some conservative lawmakers from rural districts might be hard-pressed by their constituents to vote against

the FTA. […] For a few beef or tangerine producers, Korea should not abandon the KORUS FTA, Lee said. The FTA

will benefit all Korean consumers and create cheaper goods for all. The government has a responsibility to act in

the interest of all Koreans. Lee joked that the emphasis on saving Korean beef was already water under the bridge

since Korean beef was not really Korean since the cows eat U.S. feed.” (A cable allegedly composed on 5 June 2007

by Alexander Vershbow the then US ambassador in Seoul. Available at <

http://wikileaks.org/cable/2007/06/07SEOUL1711.html>)

confirming the popular suspicion of the Washington Consensus on

the beef deal part of the Korea-US Free Trade Agreement (KORUS FTA), the significance of the present

study lies in the fact that it has thrown up some fundamental questions. One of them is whether

horizontally networked efforts such as Eonsoju will ever be able to match up to vertically aligned

institutions, especially in societies like Korea where the latter have always been more prominent (Lee,

2009a). Another question is, in a broader interpretation of Etling, Faris and Palfrey’s findings (2011), how

then to create a system that is more “responsive” to the needs and opinions expressed through such

networks and harness their democratising potential.







REFERENCES

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their disposal and boycott.” The Hankyoreh, 23 June. <

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Cho, G.-M. (2005). Study on marriage chains among Korean media owners. Unpublished Master’s

dissertation, Sogang University, Seoul. [Korean].

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"The Fragile Beauty of P2P Movements in South Korea"

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