South Korea

“Net-Addicted” Society

According to BusinessWeek, approximately 15 million people (i.e., a third of the entire population), including 90 percent of those in their late teens and early 20s, had registered for Cyworld as of 2005. As Wired Magazine notes, South Koreans ask, “do you Cy?” instead of asking for an e-mail address or phone number. In fact, South Koreans are very active on social networking Websites. Based on the 2006 survey data of Ipsos Insight, 55 percent of regular Korean Internet users had accessed a social networking site in the past 30 days, which is the highest percentage among many countries with a well-developed Internet infrastructure. In this regard, South Korea is one of the most “Net-addicted” societies in the world.

South Koreans' building relationships on social networking Websites is also inextricably intertwined with the scaffold of their off-line relationships. A 2006 study of Cyworld conducted by Kim Yong-Hak (a leading social network analyst in Korea) and colleagues found that the online social network pattern of South Koreans can be described as “birds of a feather flock together.” Importantly, this homophilious network pattern is significantly associated with key sociodemographic and geographic characteristics such as gender, age, and residential proximity. Among these factors, residential proximity was the strongest factor that conditioned online social networking. In their recent study on the structural changes in online networks from Web 1.0 to Web 2.0, Chien-leng Hsu and Han Woo Park found that Twitter networks between Korean politicians have become denser. They found that, unlike HTML-based homepage networks that were sparsely knitted and formed around prominent hubs in early 2000, online social ties between politicians on recent Web 2.0 applications, including Twitter, were fragmented and formed butterfly networks based on political homophily.

Notably, the homophilious network pattern in South Koreans' online networking reflects traditional social networks of South Koreans. Before industrialization, interpersonal relationships among people in Korea were established within a small village whose primary industry was agriculture. Social cooperation among members of a village was requisite to maintain agricultural production, often developed and maintained based on blood ties. In many cases, families having the same last name lived together in a same village and created inter-family connections through marriages, which contributed to solidarity. Coupled with this, institutionalized social cooperations such as Hang-yak, Doo-re, and Gye, which are types of mutual financial, social, and labor support, also contributed to increasing solidarity.

With South Korea's rapid industrialization since the 1960s, the traditional village networks were transformed in order to develop local economy through industrialization, by which power elites in the government and enterprises allocate and distribute resources. During industrialization, the networked centrality of Seoul as a technological innovation base had been increasing since the mid-2000s, although the Korean government has faced strong pressure that excessive concentration ultimately limits national competitiveness. However, Seoul is still unique in terms of its role as socioeconomic/cultural hub and population center with one-fifth of the country's population. In the allocation and distribution of resources, furthermore, schools functioned as strong social glues around which a unity of local networks is developed. Because primary and secondary schools were [Page 808]closely connected with local communities, performance of alumni networks affected development of the local economy where the schools were located. Alumni networks (especially high schools and universities) have been key social venues for getting ahead in terms of social and political circles, economic resources, and positions. In particular, the formation of elite networks dominated by particular prestigious high schools and universities, which also have a regional base because of schools' geographical locations, has strengthened intragroup solidarity and intergroup exclusion in order to maintain and reinforce such groups' superior social status.

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