South Korea is the world leader in Internet connectivity, having the world's fastest average internet connection speed. About 45 million people or 92.4% of the population are Internet users, demonstrating that the nation has a substantial relationship with their digital space. The country has consistently ranked first worldwide in the UN ICT Development Index since the launch of the index. The government established policies and programs that facilitated the rapid expansion and use of broadband.
Video Internet in South Korea
National program
South Korea leads in the number of DSL connections per head worldwide. ADSL is standard, but VDSL has started growing quickly. ADSL commonly offers speeds of 3 Mbit/s to 8 Mbit/s, with VDSL accordingly faster. The large proportion of South Korea's population living in apartment blocks helps the spread of DSL, as does a high penetration of consumer electronics in general. Many apartment buildings in built-up metropolitan areas, such as Seoul and Incheon, have speeds of up to 100 Mbit/s. VDSL is commonly found in newer apartments while ADSL is normally found in landed properties where the telephone exchange is far away.
The Internet has a higher status for many Koreans than it does in the West and the government actively supports this. According to the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation South Korea's internet is the most developed in the world. Particularly Seoul, the nation's capital, has been called "the bandwidth capital of the world". In January 2006, it became the first country to achieve over 50% broadband penetration per capita. By 2005, it was the first country to complete the conversion from dial-up to broadband. It also has the cheapest, fastest broadband in the world. Now there are experiments with speeds of 1 Gigabit per second. Additionally, in 2005 96.8% of South Korean mobile phones had Internet access.
Maps Internet in South Korea
ISP and IDC
There are 3 major ISPs. They are KT Corp, SKBroadband, and LGU+ (previously DACOM) and provides the broadband and the dedicated Internet circuit including Ethernet and operating Internet data centers in Seoul. Major MSOs are TBroad, C&M, and CJ Hello vision.
Internet speed
As of 2017, South Korea had the fastest average internet connection in the world at 28.6 Mbit/s, according to the report State of the Internet published by Akamai Technologies. South Korea's speed is four times faster than the world average of 7.0 Mbit/s. It is important to note that 100 Mbit/s services are the average standard in urban South Korean homes and the country is rapidly rolling out 1Gbit/s connections or 1,000 Mbit/s, at $20 per month, which is roughly 142 times as fast as the world average and 79 times as fast as the average speed in the United States.
Wireless broadband
South Korea has pulled ahead of every other country when it comes to broadband Internet in all categories including Speed and Quality, Adoption, Price, and Literacy and Gender Equality according to Internet Monitor. As many large, powerful countries begin to fall behind broadband experts look to South Korea for solutions. However, there are multiple reasons why South Korea's broadband is successful, such as, "Government planning, healthy competition, urban population density, private-sector growth, and Korean culture", which have made it difficult for other countries to mimic their success.
Real name policy
There is a government-level proposal to stamp out anonymity in the South Korean internet environment.
The Korea Communications Commission considers to stop the real name policy.
Cyber culture
Improved by new technologies, Cyberculture or internet culture is the cultural processes, products, or story of the culture in cyber space. Cyber culture is referred to as technoculture, internet culture, post-human culture, and high tech culture. This confusing terminology demonstrates the diversity of cyberculture. In reality, cyberculture is designated as a virtual community culture, acting as an identity of online communication, and cyber punk. Cyberculture in South Korea is more like a virtual community culture than anything else.
Feature of Cyberculture in South Korea
It is not too much say that Cyberculture in South Korea is all consumed in virtual community in the internet. Personal broadcasting platforms also play important roles, but in internet communities, cyberculture is reproduced and proliferate more than any other platforms. South Korea's cyberculture is quite aggressive because of anonymity and people who want to get attentions by producing provocative words. To prevent this from getting worse, the South Korean government decided regulating personal broadcasting platforms, especially Afreeca TV that had been surrounded in controversial issues as to whether it corrupts cyberculture or not.
Route of Cyberculture in South Korea
Personal broadcasting platforms
Many cyberculture are produced on internet streaming broadcast. There are many contents such as mukbang, gaming, and visible radio in personal broadcasting platforms. . Broadcast Jockey(BJ) try to make their own broadcast's atmosphere and sometimes it would be a new cyberculture. Basically, communication between the streamer and real-time viewrer is one of the important things in personal broadcast. In this process, cultures are created and these created cultures will be shown throughout internet communities.
Internet Communities
Internet Communities can be referred as the nests of cyberculture in South Korea. Many cyberculture are used, consumed, produced, and reproduced. Hit-cyberculture on internet communities often permeate through offline. A field of language is the most remarkable field. Internet communities lead this language trend in South Korea. Even though there are countless internet communities, there are some communities to see thoroughly. Each internet community has different interests and different people gather at different community sites. So, their atmosphere and the cyberculture that they produce and consume are different from each other.
- DC inside - DC inside has an internet community has many forums(a.k.a gallery) for different interests. This community was organized as community of interest about cameras and pictures for amateur photographers at first, but its purpose was changed to internet community. There are forums about almost every things. People who have same interest can discuss about it on DC inside. In this process, many cyberculture are produced and consumed.
- Todayhummor - Todayhummor was a community focusing humor as like its name. As more and more people are gathering, however, it is more than humor community now. This community is the one of the most popular communities in Korea. It was ranked at the most popular community in 2014 among internet communities. The users of the community are politically far-left. So every election season, this community be a hot potato.
- Diesel Mania - Diesel Mania is online community that was started as community for substitution for purchasing Diesel Jean and True religion. The biggest male-fashion community in South Korea. This community has real-name policy. Because of it, this community's issues are less rather than other communities.
These differences between communities makes cyberculture in South Korea diverse.
NAMU Wiki
History
The Angel Halo wiki, the predecessor of the NAMU Wiki, was founded on March 1, 2007. It specialized in animation, comics, and Internet neologism. It was popular because of its unique narrative method of mixing jokes such as puns, and various people continued to write for it making it bigger. It changed its name to the Liga Vedic wiki in 2012. However, it became one of the alternative wikis forking this wiki when it became impossible to operate due to the debacle of the League Vedic wiki operator privatizing wikis, and it was made up as a separate site that backed up about 90% of the League Vedic wiki documents. After the privatization of the League Vedai Wiki, most of the League Vedic Wiki users have become NAMU Wiki and Libre Wiki users. As of March 13, 2017, NAMU Wiki outperformed the Korean Wikipedia in that NAMU Wiki ranked 11th on the list of popular websites in Korea while Korean Wiki ranked 33rd, and Google Search, which reflects user preferences. As causative factors of the wiki's popular, the B-list language used in the NAMU wiki was filled with jokes, such as puns, and people responded to the preference of the users who liked the flimsy stories rather than the hard explanations. Also, it is analyzed that the size of the Korean version of Wikipedia is smaller than other language versions and the lack of content makes the NAMU wiki more popular.
Meaning in Cyberculture in South Korea
The NAMU wiki, which is popular with people because of these stimulating factors is actively participating in internet culture and events recorded on the NAMU wiki. All the materials in various fields are constantly generated in the wiki. As the characteristic of the wiki, it could be considered as Korea cyber culture storage. A lot of participants can be added and modified in one event, resulting in collective intelligence. As a result of constant user participation and the uploading of contents in various fields, the cyber history of Korea can be seen. For example, Internet culture created and consumed by personal broadcasts and communities is eventually stored on a NAMU wiki. Although due to the large number of participants, NAMU Wiki may have unverified or biased content. This may lead to arbitrary authoring, creation of untrusted sources, and so on. This is an inevitable problem that arises from the fact that the motto of NAMU Wiki is that everyone can contribute. But, this may also be resolved by a large number of steady participation. Articles that are biased or arbitrarily written are reviewed by others several times, hundreds of times, and the articles may be modified by anyone. This will fill the NAMU wiki with unambiguous descriptions and trusted sources that can be selected by anyone.
Example of Cyberculture in South Korea
A gale of bitcoin
As bitcoin trading and virtual money trading are gaining popularity in South Korea, buzzwords related with these trading are getting popular on SNS and other communities.
- GAZUA (???) - is kind of a magic word. People say it when they want express their hope that bitcoin's price goes up to their expectation. literally it means 'Go'. People started using this word in real world.
- Jonber (??) - word represent 'Do not sell the coin till price goes high'
- Yeongcha Yeongcha (????) - The sound that many people put together to strengthen their energy. People use this word as a hope to increase price of virtual cash.
Criticism
Many of the online security breaches in South Korea seem to stem from a common use of comparatively outdated browsers and security software.
There is occasional criticism claiming that foreign websites are significantly slower than South-Korean websites, for example websites for video streaming. This is a common problem in any country trying to communicate over foreign waters, since the latency in transcontinental communication is higher due to the physical distance that the signal has to travel.
See also
- Internet censorship in South Korea
- Net neutrality
- Digital divide in South Korea
References
Further reading
- McCurry, Justin (July 13, 2010), "Internet addiction driving South Koreans into realms of fantasy", The Guardian
- Ramstad, Evan; Woo, Jaeyeon (June 30, 2010), "South Korea Relaxes Curbs on Web Browsers", Wall Street Journal
Source of article : Wikipedia
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