The fragile beauty of peer-to-peer activism: The public campaign for the rights of media consumers in South Korea

Abstract

In South Korea, the oligopoly of three conservative media conglomerates, popularly dubbed Chojoongdong, has been identified as a hindrance to the country's democratic consolidation. This issue came to the fore during the mass candlelight protests in Seoul in 2008 against the then newly elected conservative government's resumption of American beef imports despite public concern over the credibility of US food regulation. Born out of the beef protests was a peer-to-peer (P2P) network of individual citizens who called for media reform, condemning what they saw as Chojoongdong's biased dominance of public discourse. Based on an ethnographic study of the inception and evolution of this digitally mediated network, Eonsoju, from 2008 to 2013, this article discusses the spatial opportunities and institutional challenges of digital activism. Eonsoju initially demonstrated a considerable potential of a P2P model for activism, but it soon had to compromise its structural and operational strengths due to legal pressures.

Mapping the emergence of social media in everyday journalistic practices

“…The particular technological affordances of social media have meant that audiences are more often invited into the journalistic process, either by providing new voices to reportage or through their comments on, and sharing of, news that is important to them. Furthermore, journalists have begun to change their presentation and dissemination of news by using social media to share their personal opinions, humorous stories from their beat and even aspects of their personal lives, as an addition to their professional reportage (Lee, 2015). Although journalists have not traditionally acknowledged this kind of public awareness of their professional (and personal) selves, many have become aware of its importance while using social media as a way to maintain audience perceptions of their authenticity and credibility (boyd and Ellison, 2007).…”

Paragogy and flipped assessment: experience of designing and running a MOOC on research methods

“…elaborating, Corneli (2012, p. 267) notes that paragogical approaches are likely to be 'at odds with established educational systems in some respects' . In other words, there is a tension between the traditional expectation of vertical delivery of teaching from academic to student and the horizontal flow of peer learning which treats all participants as learners (see also Lee, 2015, pp.…”

VOIP technology in grassroots politics: Transforming political culture and practice?

“…The introduction of public health restrictions on gatherings in response to Covid-19 in March 2020 fundamentally reoriented the Sydney Alliance's use of physical space and relationship to Sydney as a geographic entity as they were forced to move their organising online. In his study of a South Korean social movement, Lee (2016Lee ( , p. 2259 writes that the activists' 'appropriation of cyberspace' was a reaction to the 'fragmentation and commodification of physical public spaces in Korean cities' that stymied their efforts to mobilise effectively in physical space. The Sydney Alliance's pivot to exclusively online organising was a similar reaction to the loss of physical space, although in this instance, because of state-imposed restrictions on gatherings to control the Covid-19 pandemic.…”

“…The Sydney Alliance's pivot to exclusively online organising was a similar reaction to the loss of physical space, although in this instance, because of state-imposed restrictions on gatherings to control the Covid-19 pandemic. These instances of 'exploration' (Lee, 2016(Lee, , p. 2262 or appropriation of digital technologies to circumvent state restrictions echo the hopes of early internet theorists that the internet was a space of freedom with emancipatory potential (Daniels, 2009;Loewenstein, 2008, p. 9), and of more recent digital activism scholars writing on 'third spaces' or new digital public space (Arora, 2015;Smith and Halafoff 2020). Mattoni (2017, p. 501) argues that the increasingly widespread use of digital communication technologies has changed the 'temporal and spatial characteristics of political participation and mobilization'.…”