Suchergebnisse

Abstract
In Korea, social networking sites are overwhelmingly utilized through smart phones; people tweet or update Facebook with their mobile devices. Like any social networking site, this means that people are making (and remaking) connections with each other, but it also means that people are connecting in complex ways to place. Even if geo-location is disabled, these social media still have this embodied dimension; they're not just tweets, but tweets in a particular space and time. In Seoul, embodied practices of social media infuse spaces with diverse and networked meaning that interact (however weakly) with existing spatial systems. In this essay, I explore the diverse meaning of public space in Seoul through an analysis of Twitter traffic surrounding enormous protests in 2016 at Gwanghwamun Plaza calling for the resignation of President Park Geun-hye. People who protested against the President in Gwanghwamun Plaza were not only calling for her resignation, but they are also making strong claims to space that re-define the heterogeneous site as a space of protest. At the same time, they are not the only groups making claims on the plaza: conservative groups, merchants, commuters, tourists and various bots tweet other meanings through their interactions with the protest site, and these, too, add to the networked representation of Gwanghwamun Plaza. Ultimately, the paper suggests a theory of social media in urban settings which emphasizes complex interactions of space, representation, networked action, absence and presence.

In Korea, social networking sites are overwhelmingly utilized through smart phones; people tweet or update Facebook with their mobile devices. Like any social networking site, this means that people are making (and remaking) connections with each other, but it also means that people are connecting in complex ways to place. Even if geo-location is disabled, these social media still have this embodied dimension; they're not just tweets, but tweets in a particular space and time. In Seoul, embodied practices of social media infuse spaces with diverse and networked meaning that interact (however weakly) with existing spatial systems. In this essay, I explore the diverse meaning of public space in Seoul through an analysis of Twitter traffic surrounding enormous protests in 2016 at Gwanghwamun Plaza calling for the resignation of President Park Geun-hye. People who protested against the President in Gwanghwamun Plaza were not only calling for her resignation, but they are also making strong claims to space that re-define the heterogeneous site as a space of protest. At the same time, they are not the only groups making claims on the plaza: conservative groups, merchants, commuters, tourists and various bots tweet other meanings through their interactions with the protest site, and these, too, add to the networked representation of Gwanghwamun Plaza. Ultimately, the paper suggests a theory of social media in urban settings which emphasizes complex interactions of space, representation, networked action, absence and presence.

ABSTRACTThis essay is motivated by the seeming contradiction that Korean unification is sought after by most Koreans yet speculations about the social and cultural changes it might bring are almost absent. This may be because Korean unification denotes a series of differences contrasted to the present—because it is a potent "master symbol" with one foot in utopian speculation and the other in policy studies. In this essay, I outline some of the complexities, starting with an examination of illustrations of unification in textbooks for the tensions and contradictions they introduce. I then turn to fiction and film, sketching not only what some South Koreans hope (or fear) will happen after unification with the North but, indeed, the limits of their imagination regarding what the future will hold for South Korea. In the end, I concur with Grinker that representations of unification are "utopian," but I object to the association of "utopia" with a socially engineered straitjacket. On the contrary, the utopias projected here suggest stepping off a precipice into worlds unknown, futures defined by their radical difference from today. The end of the essay locates these more imaginative dimensions of Korean unification in the "hope" of Ernst Bloch.