Digital Development in Korea(한국 디지털 발전사) Reviewed in The Electronics Newspaper

I was pleased to learn this past week that my recent book with Dr. Myung Oh, Digital Development in Korea:  Building an Information Society, has been reviewed by Korea's Electronics Newspaper (전자신문). Dr. Oh and I substantially finished the manuscript and delivered it to Routledge in London  in early August 2010.

Readers interested in the newspaper's Korean language overview of the book can find it here in the "Books Closeup" section.

"South Korea's Smart Phone Love Affair Lures Foreign Suitors": More to the Story

I was reading the paper edition of the International Herald Tribune on an Air Canada flight to Vancouver B.C. yesterday when I ran across the Reuters story "South Korea's Smart Phone Love Affair Lures Foreign Suitors."  As mainstream international journalism goes, it was quite a good report, but it suffers from the same weaknesses that characterize most such reporting about Korea, and about its remarkable ICT sector in particular.  They include a lack of historical perspective and a shortage of data or evidence-based analysis.

First, the Reuters analysis notes that the number of smartphone subscribers in South Korea has exploded more than ten-fold to top 10 million in just 18 months, now accounting for around a fifth of the population. However, the analysis fails to note the most obvious reason for this rapid growth, the fact that development of the smartphone market in South Korea was delayed for about two and one half years by strategic corporate decisions and legal requirements. Indeed, the two and a half years preceding entry of Apple's iPhone into the South Korean market at the end of 2009 provide an extremely informative picture of how government, the major mobile service providers and Korea's handset manufacturers, led by Samsung and LG, approached the situation. The Reuters analysis, while not inaccurate per se, simply fails to provide some of this essential historical perspective.

Second,quoting a Seoul-based industry source, the report notes that smart phones have become a “Trojan horse into the Korean market” for the likes of Google and Facebook, which had a head start on local firms in optimising their offerings for smart phones. This is an insightful point, but again, the Reuters article does not go on to address the question of why the Trojan horse metaphor should apply to Korea in 2010 and 2011. The article mentions the dominance of companies like Daum, Naver and SK Communications in the South Korean market and the PC-based approach in Korea, but stops short of explaining the main reasons for this. These include both the role of language in shaping patterns of internet use and South Korea's half-decade or more lead on the U.S. and other western countries in building its fiber-based information superhighways. These two factors are keys to the dominance of Naver in search and the market leadership of Cyworld in social networking, although simple one to one comparisons of Naver to Google or Cyworld to Facebook and other social networking services are not realistic.

There is much more to all of this than can be conveyed in a blog post.  However, I could not let the interesting Reuters news analysis pass without some comment, since it touches directly on issues treated at some length in my new book, co-authored with Dr. Myung Oh, Digital Development in Korea:  Building an Information Society (Routledge, March 2011).  Those of you interested in delving further into the issues touched upon here will want to read portions that book.

Digital Development in Korea Now Available in E-book Formats

Digital Development in Korea:  Building an Information Society, is now available via Amazon.com in a format for Kindle and other e-readers.  It looks quite nice on the 7" Samsung Galaxy Tab device I've been using.  And, of course, the electronic version has the advantages of being hyperlinked and searchable.  

Digital Development in Korea is Finally Published!

Over the weekend I stopped by my old office to pick up mail and, to my surprise, found a package from Routledge in London containing a single advance copy of the book that Dr. Oh Myung and I wrote.  Digital Development in Korea:  Building an Information Society. (see Routledge web site for details)  It was very satisfying to finally hold a printed copy of the book in my hands, as regular readers of this blog will know from my prior posts about it.    Just use the search tool at the right and enter "Why a Book" to see all of my posts dealing with my personal motivation to undertake this project.

I've written or co-authored a number of books over the years, but this one is very special, mostly because of the opportunity to co-author it with Dr. Oh.  

The e-book version of our book should be available very shortly.  In the meantime, the hardback edition has been rather widely publicized and marketed around the world via Amazon and many other booksellers.

It is an interesting experience to work on a printed book in this day and age of instant electronic communication.   Dr. Oh and I worked on the book for nearly three years and delivered the final, edited manuscript to Routledge in early August of last year.

If any readers of this blog happen to read our book, I'd be pleased to entertain and respond to comments here.

Why a Book on Digital Development in Korea: Reason 5, the Review Process

I've just finished reading the first page proofs of my forthcoming book with Dr. Oh, Myung entitled Digital Development in Korea:  Building an Information Society.  Doing so couldn't help but remind me of a fifth reason for writing the book:  the review process.  Writing a book like this starts with a proposal to the publisher.   That proposal undergoes review by acquisitions editors and sometimes series editors.  In the case of academic books like ours, the publisher sends out the proposal, including a number of chapter drafts, for a confidential peer review by other scholars in the field.  Then, assuming the book is accepted, the manuscript goes through one or two more reviews before and after the typesetting stage of production.

Yes, these multiple reviews may at times become tedious from the author's standpoint, but there can be little doubt that they contribute immensely to the quality of the final product.  I was reminded of this while responding to specific questions raised by the copy editor who read the page proofs before they were sent to us for review.

Why a Book on Digital Development in Korea: Reason 4, the Book Format

Within a week or so my co-author and I should receive the first page proofs from Routledge of our forthcoming book, Digital Development in Korea: Building an Information Society. Routledge has published preliminary information about the book on its web site here.   This post is another in my series of thoughts about why I would want to co-author a book on this topic.  Why write a book, especially one that is subjected to a long process of blind (anonymous) peer review, and then takes 6-8 months to produce and print?

A fourth reason is simply that the book format is proving remarkably resilient in the face of digital convergence and the information revolution generally.  Google has its book project.  The Kindle and its competitors are all "e-book" readers.  In the midst of all the current changes, the concept of the book (versus the magazine article, newspaper article, blog post or many other shorter formats) holds a certain attraction for both readers and potential authors.   Despite the rapid growth of the internet and various digital information sources that it interlinks, many doctoral students around the world still strive to publish their doctoral dissertations as a book!

Whether in e-format, hardback or paperback, there is something about the book that appeals to human readers around the globe.  I recall once, during a conversation with my co-author when I mentioned publishing it in e-book format, he smiled and said something to the effect that "but you still need to print a book!"

Having said all this, it would seem that the delivery format for books is shifting toward electronic readers and digital distribution via the internet.   However, the length and basic chapter structure of a book are likely to stay with us for some time to come.

You're invited to contest or add to my Reason #4.   More reasons to come in future posts.  

Why a Book on Digital Development in Korea: Reason 3--Language

A third reason I can think of for co-authoring a book on Digital Development in Korea is language.  By that I mean to emphasize several points.  First, while there has been a great deal written about these developments in Korean media and scholarly journals, there is a lack of such information in English.  Second, my own ability to read, write and speak Korean has improved to a point where it motivated me toward a better effort to understand the 한국의정보사회.  There is little doubt in my mind that the language barrier alone explains in part the relative lack of international scholarly attention to Korea's remarkable developments.  Third, as our forthcoming book will explain, language is a key factor in explaining the distinctive pattern of South Korea's digital development. The popularity of Naver versus Google, for example.   And, of course, language and culture are ever so closely intertwined.  

Why a Book on Digital Development in Korea: Reason 2--History

A second major reason for co-authoring my forthcoming book with Dr. OH, Myung (Digital Development in Korea:  Building an Information Society) was the need for historical perspective on Korea's accomplishments.  This is the second post in my informal series on the reasons for the book.

If you're like me, you've read many industry or press reports that make it sound as though the information revolution occurred just within the past few months or perhaps years.  For example, many published reports about Korea's broadband infrastructure access and use begin the story in the mid-1990s or later.

The developments during South Korea's so-called "1980s telecommunications revolution" need to be included in the story to comprehend today's evolving information society here.   As of 1980, the nation suffered from a massive backlog in telephone service, its basic telephone network had only a few imported digital switches, and efforts to enter the semiconductor industry could be described as somewhat hit-and-miss.  The development of Korea's networks and its electronics sector during the 1980s was truly revolutionary.  It also laid the foundation and set precedents for developments in the 1990s and beyond, illustrating what economists refer to as the "on the shoulders of giants" characteristic of information.  That is, information is both an input and and output of its own production process.  As explained by Yochai Benkler in The Wealth of Networks, in order to write today's academic or news article, I need access to yesterday's articles and reports.  So it is with building advanced digital networks.  Also, the technology is continually changing, so that a long-term project to build a certain network over fifteen years might be shorted to ten years owing to technological change.

Why a Book on Digital Development in Korea: Reason 1

Here goes.  The idea occurred to me some time ago and I've decided to act on it.  In a series of posts over the next 4-6 months, I'm going to share with readers of this blog some of the reasons why I teamed up recently with Dr. OH, Myung to write our forthcoming book, Digital Development in Korea:  Building an Information Society Routledge, March 2011.  Let me be clear from the beginning that these posts reflect my own perspective, not necessarily that of my co-author, who has a long and distinguished career in Korea's ICT sector, and has written or spoken publicly on many of these issues.

One of the first reasons for undertaking this book project was quite simple.  There appeared to be no other scholarly book in existence that examined South Korea's ICT development over the past three decades.  Back in the 1990s I had spent more than two years researching and writing The Telecommunications Revolution in Korea (Hong Kong, Oxford University Press, 1995)  Well over a decade had passed since that book was written, years which I spent as an administrator with the Fulbright Commission in Seoul, formally known as the Korean American Educational Commission, with responsibilities for our academic testing (mainly TOEFL) and technology (the web was becoming the principal channel for study abroad advising).  My personal experience of Korea's burgeoning networks and electronics sector convinced me that an update of my book was in order.  So, I contacted editors at Oxford University Press in New York, London and Hong Kong with my idea.  After some weeks of e-mail consultation, they declined to even receive a proposal for a new book, citing the lack of a market for such in the U.S. and other English-speaking countries.  Whether or not there is/was such a market is a topic for another post.

To some extent it is true that the world took note of South Korea's digital development, especially when it emerged with the arrival of the new millenium as the world leader in broadband internet penetration as shown by leading international measures.  It is also true that the ITU published a short monograph entitled Broadband Korea:  Internet Case Study in 2003, the OECD has published voluminous statistics, and the World Bank has paid attention to the Korean experience through its project and series of publications on Korea As a Knowledge Economy.   Ahonen and O'Reilly's book, Digital Korea, which appeared in 2007 is an industry-oriented survey of the Korean experience.

In addition to these efforts, there was a measureable increase in the number of articles appearing in scholarly journals about the Korean experience.  However, given the magnitude of Korea's ICT-fueled development, one might have expected a dozen doctoral dissertations and at least half that many books to appear over the past decade and a half.   The story of why such research was not undertaken and published in English is a complex one involving lack of Korean language and area expertise on the part of Western scholars, coupled with a lack of incentive for leading Korean scholars to publish in English for a world academic audience.

However, I stand by my argument.  One of the first reasons for co-authoring Digital Development in Korea, was that there were no other books available that offered a similar treatment of this important topic!

Digital Development in Korea: Building an Information Society

Now that Dr. Oh and I have delivered the manuscript of our new book to Routledge for production, I'm pleased to share some additional details.  As we explain in the book's Preface, this collaborative project came about because of our common interest in the role of ICT in South Korea's development over the past three decades.  Routledge has updated its web site with information about the book, including the following:

An Overall Description

Reviews (excerpt from Foreword )

Contents

Author's Biographical Notes

The book is on schedule to be published in February of next year.