This December I was fortunate to be invited to Seoul for a conference organized by the public media center MediAct about community media in the digital age. Here’s a pdf of my presentation: the future of public media in the US context.

I’d been there once before, in 2004, to attend a similar workshop and also to screen the Miami Model (an Indymedia documentary about the mobilization against the Free Trade Area of the Americas that I participated in making) at the Seoul Human Rights Film Festival (SHURIFF). At the time, I went with Dorothy Kidd, and after the conference we got an amazing tour of the social movement media organizations around Seoul.

In addition to seeing the production and training facilities that the social movements had secured in the form of MediAct and visiting another community media center in another part of the city, we learned about the history of workers’ video collectives during the time of the dictatorship from folks at Labor News Production; we heard from Sarangbang about how during the first years of the Human Rights Film Festival the government tried to shut down the screenings with police and the social movements successfully fought for their right to screen films; we went to the offices of JinboNet, who provide IT infrastructure and support for Korean social movements as well as policy proposals against Net censorship and for access to knowledge and information; we met with IT staff from the Korean Confederation of Trade Unions (KCTU); we attended a migrant workers’ video training that was part of the epic migrant workers’ Sit-In Struggle at Myoung Dong Cathedral; and we met with a group that was trying to start up a Korea Indymedia. We learned about the richness, depth, and history of South Korean media activism, and heard from local activists about the near total disconnect between OhMyNews and Korean social movements, even while the English blogosphere was holding OhMyNews up as a shining example of media democracy.

So what changed between 2004 and 2008? A hell of a lot, of course, and I can’t even try here to do justice to the small amount that I do understand, but I can mention a couple of elements I found interesting.

First of all, in 2004 the centrist Roh Moo-Hyun administration had recently come to power on promises to seek reconciliation with North Korea, deepen democracy in South Korea, open government and corporate contracts to public scrutiny, and renegotiate S. Korea’s relationship with the US Military. Roh came to office with support from the left, labor, and students, riding the wave of mass mobilization against the US Military that came after they killed two middle school students in a vehicle accident. Once in power, Roh pedalled steadily to the right, pushing the US-Korea Free Trade Agreement and sending Korean troops to Iraq, and he completely lost the confidence of Korean people across the political spectrum. Despite all that, his administration provided some openings for Korean media activists to push for more democratic media policy. Media activists managed to secure funds to create a number of new community media centers around the country. They also were able to build up RTV, Korea’s first public access TV channel; for example, over the last few years the Migrant Worker video workshop that we saw in 2004 grew into a regular show on RTV that produced around 200 episodes of multilingual migrant worker news: Migrant Worker TV.

In 2007, conservative candidate Lee Myung Bak came to power with a large margin of the vote, but the lowest voter turnout ever. LMB was CEO of Hyundai, then Mayor of Seoul, and came in promising to run the country like a successful multinational company. He’s a neoliberal ideologue who is intent on pushing forward the USKORFTA, wants to “get rid of” militant trade unions, has been rolling back free speech and freedom of assembly, repeatedly deployed police force against peaceful protesters, and has just eliminated funding for RTV. His administration is also taking additional steps to monitor and control the Net. So media activists are now on the defensive, trying to protect the gains they’ve won over the last couple of decades.

However, in a long conversation over rice wine with Sejin, who used to work providing IT services for KCTU, during this visit to Seoul we heard a really interesting analysis of the current shift in the Korean social movement media situation that could be summed up like this: participatory media is taking center stage.

The trigger was the recent round of mass mobilizations and candlelight vigils that began as a “No Mad Cow Disease” protest by a handful of middle school girls against US Beef imports, but grew over the next two months into a nightly vigil of hundreds of thousands of people opposed to LMB’s neoliberal privatisation plans. George Katsiafacis’ summary of the mobilization wave is a good read and makes a similar point to Sejin: despite the claims of the government and police, the mobilizations weren’t organized by the labor unions or the existing social movement organizations. It was organized mostly online and via mobile phones, and as it grew and grew, the State was increasingly bewildered and frustrated by its inability to ‘decapitate’ the movement by arresting the people they thought were the ‘leaders.’ For example, they thought that KCTU was behind the protests, so they tried to arrest KCTU leadership, but KCTU was just as surprised as police at the growing turnout. Violent repression by police ended up radicalizing people and swelling the ranks of the protesters. People converted popular commercial sites like Agora at Daum.net into forums for debate and mobilization, and documented their own participation in the protests using the tools they use everyday anyway. For a longer blow-by-blow check out this article on Newscham.net.

This is not to say that the existing media activism infrastructure didn’t play a role - of course it did. In a similar way, the labor unions soon entered the mobilizations, and young students and middle class people who had never protested before learned some tactics from them - for example, how to confront riot police. But these organizations were not the initiators or drivers of the mobilization wave, nor of the popular communication that blossomed inside of it. Sejin, who also happens to be translating leftist scifi into Korean as part of a larger project that looks at ideological battles inside science fiction narratives, has been thinking about writing something on the meaning of the Multitude in the South Korean context. I hope he writes it soon

In any case, as I write this post, the public broadcaster KBS is also under attack, but this time from the left and below, most recently for censoring their New Years’ coverage to eliminate images of candlelight protesters. To follow the ongoing situation in S. Korea, check out the various links above as well as some others like Newscham, Global Voices South Korea, Anarclan, Two Koreas, and Seoulidarity.net. Oh yeah, and it looks like there’s going to be another (3rd? 4th?) attempt to start up an Indymedia Korea. Good luck!