Once Again, South Koreans Prove Exceptionally Prone to Mass Hysteria
There are times when I wonder if South Koreans will ever learn anything from the entire Mad Cow fiasco, when all it takes to spread mass hysteria in a prosperous, technologically advanced, industrialized society is a 16 year-old with high speed Internet:
Police said yesterday that the boy, resident of Yeosu, South Jeolla, identified only by his surname, Yoo, sent 15 friends an online message that South Korea had decided to “make a pre-emptive military attack on North Korea” because it was “only a matter of time” until the North, fully prepared for war, invaded.
“All males over the age of 17 should take part in the battle and all schools will be shut down,” read the message sent at 11:23 p.m. on May 26.
Yoo allegedly sent his message as military tensions between the two Koreas made headlines after Seoul blamed Pyongyang for sinking South Korea’s Cheonan warship. Yoo reportedly told police he wanted to “fool people.
Yoo’s friends soon started relaying the message to their own friends, police said. The spread of the message increased exponentially as teenagers in South Chungcheong, Gyeonggi, Gangwon, Seoul, Busan and Incheon passed it to their own friends on in the following 48 minutes, before one of them, a 12-year-old elementary school student, posted it on the online board of a major Internet portal site.
And to think they’ll all be voting in just a few years!
In what must be one of the great ironies of our time, a society known for technological Luddism is proving to be exceptionally capable at stealing online ID’s to circumvent South Korea’s lame internet restrictions, spreading conspiracy theories, and posting propaganda videos that become viral hits in South Korea. And the best response the hub of LG and Starcraft addicts can muster is … a couple of loudspeakers blaring K-pop to bored North Korean soldiers? Are you kidding me?
Why do the North Koreans have such a pathological fear of the free flow of information? My guess is, they’ve seen how gullible and easily manipulated South Koreans are, and they suspect that the same is true of their own subjects.
Birthers are so different how?!
This is the quote that killed me:
“Some people are worried that it has become too difficult to resume the propaganda broadcasts at all,” another (South Korean military) source said. “But while we’re definitely going to resume them, the programs will focus on content like music that will not upset the North too much.”
http://english.chosun.com/site/data/html_dir/2010/06/10/2010061000312.html
We certainly don’t want to upset the North Koreans too much; in fact I should also highly recommend Sarah Chang’s recent recording of the Brahms Violin Concerto, Op. 77, with its attractively deliberate resistance to pulse. (Apologies to Adam Cathcart)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4MSNBsMXqlU
http://adamcathcart.wordpress.com/
I thought psychological warfare would entail cyber attacks on any North Korean networks that would include planting rumors such as the Dear Leader’s death, or just airing North Korea’s laundry list like Dear Leader’s offshore bank account.
You know things that would actually hurt North Korea’s military to maintain control without physical violence. Instead we have bad K-pop which actually would make any North Korean want to stay in North Korea.
Balloon Boy anyone? Americans are just as prone to such pranks.
Exhibit A: 23 million people regard a despot who died 16 years ago to be not only the current legal ruler of all Korea, but he’s “abaji” (their daddy)…
I can count on one hand how many people I know who have thought far enough ahead to even consider the psychological, spiritual, moral and social disaster that will follow the political, military and economic collapse of Pyongyang.
Peter and Steven Yu need to look up “tu quoque” to help us stay on topic. Those are lame and inapt analogies to South Korean viral madness in any case.
The treacly, barf-inducing type of K-pop they plan to broadcast across the DMZ might actually convince the North Koreans that their system is better or that South Korea is too infantile and feckless to resist attack.
But there is plenty of South Korean soft power content that would help the cause. TV, film, straight up documentaries, accurate histories of the Korean War and other Korean issues — anything that underscores the South’s prosperity.
slim wrote:
I see your point, slim, and my own thinking that pointing out irrational beliefs held by a sizable minority in the US would sound exactly like a tu quoque argument caused me to hold back.
But now that the door has been opened, I’ll put in my two cents that in a case where an argument is being made that some group is especially or solely some way (e.g., being exceptionally some way), then it is reasonable to point out the same or a similar foible in other groups.
I have no disagreement that some Koreans are prone to mass hysteria (which allows the chinboistas to operate), but I’m not so sure I agree that KoKos are “exceptionally” so.
I don’t know if the Balloon Boy hoax is a good example of bandwagoning or mass hysteria, but the birther or truther movements strike me as potential counterpoints to the idea that KoKos are exceptionally prone to out-of-control emotion on a large scale. The obsession with the idea that 9/11 was an inside job or Obama’s birth in Hawaii is a grand hoax is perpetuated by a consistent focus by people using certain media, and their latest pronouncements do spread quickly (I have a distant-relative “uncle” who regularly forwards me the latest on how Obamacare will destroy the country and how Obama is a Kenya-born closet Muslim, so I think I have some idea).
At any rate, the ability of the chinboistas to exaggerate their true representativeness is a key aspect of their m.o. and their occasional successes in effecting change in official policy.
Though they are aggressive, not frightened, they remind me of cats that arch their backs and stand hair on end and on tippy-toes to make themselves look more than double their actual size, and triple as scary.
Good points all, Kushibo.
Still, I think remarks that begin and end with a blatant logical fallacy deserve the red card — even if they raise issues that can fruitfully be analyzed.
This small viral incident is perhaps not the most representative example of what Joshua’s talking about here. I’d point to netizen-induced celebrity suicides, the beef protests, the 2002 schoolgirl deaths, nearly anything involving Anton Apollo Ohno in 2002 and 2010.
Birthers are a fringe movement that do not enjoy sympathetic mainstream media coverage and in fact face derision in many quarters.
The balloon boy case was an out-and-out hoax, an example of mass rubbernecking rather than hysteria, that quickly evaporated for the nation once the balloon landed.
I’d guess that highly wired Korea’s population density, small territory, media saturation, educational uniformity, homogeneity, obsessive peer consciousness and other traits not unique to Korea but stronger there explain why things go viral so easily and frequently.
I think you provide good examples, though I think the hysteria-related aspect deserves further scrutiny, and I’m not so sure if providing a cluster of examples from eight years ago qualifies as something happening in the present as going viral “so easily and frequently.”
The chinboistas were in rare form in 2002, having been handed several weapons without even trying, at a time of heightened anxiety that Bush43’s “axis of evil” rhetoric could actually bring war to the nation.
But ultimately almost all these things have in common a situation where it was still a vocal fringe running the show. Even with the two girls’ deaths, while most KoKos were upset or even angered by it, most were not calling for removal of USFK — though that was the goal of the chinboistas that were fueling and fanning the traditional media fire and the viral media fire.
And that’s a key element of the “organized” outrage that occurs in Korea: Ã la the cat with the arched back, they want to seem bigger than they are so they can scare the government or other groups into action they might not otherwise do. Even with non-organized Netizen campaigns, they are often from a very small group of people that is for whatever reason seeming more representative (or feared to be more representative) than their actual numbers (cue Marmot’s classic post on the “Super Comment Tribe” that discusses how under 12,000 commenters were leaving about half of the 4.3 million comments to Naver News in a given month).
Perhaps (and I’m sort of asking, not saying) one point where you and I disagree is on the scope of the birther or truther movements. I tend to believe that the various chinboista movements’ support is on par with that of the birther or truther movements, and maybe a point of disagreement between you and me is that I feel the birther movement is larger than you think it is, and thus represents a counterpoint to the idea of KoKos being “exceptionally prone to mass hysteria.”
In Hawaii, if anyone brings it up, it is usually out of derision (it angers people here), but when on the Mainland in places like Orange County or Las Vegas, I hear it frequently brought up in serious discussion. A poll last year showed that a majority (58 percent) of Republicans thought Obama was not born in the US (28 percent) or weren’t sure (30 percent). Among all Americans, 11 percent believe he was born outside the US and 12 percent are not sure. This is nearly one-fourth of the entire country and over half of a mainstream party believing or tending to believe something various government agencies have conclusively dealt with. Meanwhile, 36 percent of Americans (2006 poll) believe(d) that “federal officials assisted in the 9/11 terrorist attacks or took no action to stop them so the United States could go to war in the Middle East.”
But where’s the viral aspect? While I think you make good points about Korea being particularly strong in those aspects you mention at the end of your comment, I think the saturation of talk radio and the resulting fragmented radio audiences allows for an American-style viralization of at least the birther movement and its various pieces of evidence (e.g., the spikes of activity that come after the fake documents are released).
Ultimately, my concern with issues like this are twofold: First, I think it is counterproductive to focus too heavily on the vocal fringe when trying to discern the whole of KoKo opinions and actions on various issues, though this is a common and very sloppy tactic among the Western media (and one reason why the chinboistas pursue their course of action so aggressively); and second, how to address it becomes a very different calculus if the views of Korea’s loud minority (e.g., the souther movement) tend to represent a contrarian segment of the population that is common in other countries as well, versus a situation where Korea truly is “exceptional” in this regard.
Gotta run! Plane to catch!