This may seem an odd case to begin a text about social movements in digital space. On the surface, this has all the makings of a classical protest, a disorganized crowd of loosely affiliated actants uniting around a common goal. However, beneath this surface veneer, the organizational dynamics of the contention in South Korea in the summer of 2008 prove to be far more complex, deeply integrated within a multivalent social assemblage that was strongly grounded in digital space. In late June of 2008 I traveled to Seoul from Beijing where I had been living with my girlfriend for the summer prior to my third year of college. The trip was a matter of necessity and Seoul was a destination of chance; we were required to leave the country in order to renew our visas, and while we had planned to go Hong Kong there happened to be a discount on plane fare to South Korea on the day we purchased tickets. Upon our arrival, we found the city in the throes of one of the largest mass demonstrations the region has seen in the past half-century. The experience of entering this situation with an almost complete lack of information proved extremely valuable. I had never visited South Korea, nor had I previously studied its political culture or society and thus had few consciously formed preconceptions about what I ought to expect. That summer I had been trying to sell essays to a blog called Black and White whose editor was interested in getting stories firsthand from China in the build-up to the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games. It wasn‘t difficult to persuade him that the events that were transpiring in Seoul merited coverage. Compared to seasoned journalists covering the issue I was clearly inexperienced, and relative to American commentators who had been analyzing ROK politics for year I was virtually tabula rasa. Recognizing these limitations, I resolved to approach the issue with an open mind, to retrieve as much primary evidence as I could, and to thus begin to answer the question that was befuddling American commentators from the Wall Street Journal to National Public Radio. Why had South Koreans chosen to take to the streets en masse over the issue of the possible contamination of imported US beef?17 Parts of this chapter use information and data aggregated in that essay, see Edmund Zagorin ―Beef Protests: How Mobile Technology Has Politically Empowered Thousands of South Koreans‖ Black and White, June 27,2008 17
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