Impact of New Media in Korea

The purpose of the presentation is to share and inform how new media impact in Korea. Since Korea is geographically small country, the internet technology and new media spread to society rapidly. In 1998, the president of Korea, Kim Daejung, decided to invest huge amount of government budget into establish IT environment, such as DMB(Digital Multi-media Broadcasting) Also at that time, the government assigned the “Taeheranro” as IT village, which is similar to Silicon Valley. In this era, Korea built the basic infrastructure of Korean IT environment. Current Korean Internet Population is approximately 34.8 million. New Media impact many field of Korean society, such as Marketing (advertisement), Politics, Education, Social Network and Public Safety.
The New Media impact Advertisement market. In 2007, the entire media advertisement market was $38.9 billion. The old media ad, such as TV, Magazine, radio and Cable TV ad, in 2007 was 18.9 billion dollar and the portion was only 58.2% which was decreased from 74.9% in 1997. On the other hand, new media ad, such as key word ad, banner and email, was 850 million and the portion was 12.8 % which was increased from 1.5% in 1997. The market leading portal company, Naver, announced that revenue of keyword ad was more than half of their revenue in 2007.
The New Media impact Politics. With New Media, the Korean government aimed to have a close relationship with public. Public can visit the government website and find the information of government such as what they are doing, what is the issue right now and what is their strategy. Also they built government portal website which people can find the information about life of family, life of school, life of employment, health, leisure and life of retirement. Government provides the service for each field and people are able to find the service information from this website. Also government provides the service called “Simmungo”. Simmungo is the service for who think unfairly treated from the society or there is no law protect themselves. People can appeal to government directly. Government agencies will be response for the appeal.
The New Media impact the educational field. Cyber University is cyber based university. There are 17 universities are built since 2002 and there are 76,000 students today. It is continuously increased 14% year by year. It will be the opportunity for people who have full time job, disability or house wife. Tuition of the Cyber University is one third of regular full time student.
New Media changed the way to communicate in Korean Society. Cyworld is the number one cyber community site in Korea. Cyworld is similar to Facebook or Myspace. They provides people website which is easy to build without any computer skills. It was boomed in 2002. 75% of teen to 30th were used Cyworld. Since there was a privacy issue, many people left the Cyworld. However, Cyworld made the function to give owner of the website the authorization to control their users. The owner can define the group of visitors. The owner can give the authority to the group that which pages the group will be able to see. Also the owner can set unknown user could not see any pages. With this function, Cyworld successfully enhance the protection of privacy.
Since the new media and internet technologies are spread to the society there are many of cyber crimes. In 2007, there was 88,847 crime cases were occurred which are cyber fraud, Cyber stalking and hacking. The Korean government made the agency to protect public from cyber crime called “Netian”. Netian protects not only government, company or enterprise but also individual public cases.
Korean Society currently has several issues related to new media. First, there is no restriction of protecting children from violated media. Second, need to have a solution for protecting copyright of digital media. Third, need a solution to reduce the imbalance of using new media. Hi technology devices are necessary to use and access the new media, such as online gaming, accessing to big and high quality media.
In conclusion, even though the culture and the size of the country are different from US. Some of the new media issues and the new media technology could be similar from US case. It would be helpful to know what the other countries’ new media issues and conditions.