A Nostalgic Note on the Decline of PC Rooms

The Joongang Daily has an interesting article, including the accompanying graphic (click to see a full size version), on the declining number of PC bangs (PC Rooms or internet cafes) in South Korea.  As noted in the article,PC bangs enjoyed their heyday in the late 1990s and early 2000s. After the Asian financial crisis of 1997 and 1998, many people who lost their jobs opened PC bangs to survive.

Government regulations are thought to be partly behind the decline of PC Bangs.



One new restriction to take effect by the year’s end is the Cinderella law pushed jointly by the culture and family ministries. Under the law, PC bangs cannot offer online games to anyone younger than 16 from midnight to 6 a.m., in the hopes of curbing game addiction among Korean minors.



There is also a regulatory question over whether PC Bangs are allowed to sell cup ramen or green tea to their customers. Jo, a 37-year-old owner of a PC bang in Imun-dong, central Seoul, was recently hit with a fine. He was guilty of pouring boiling water into a customer’s cup ramen, and someone caught him with a camera and filed a report.



“I was told that if customers pour the water themselves, it’s OK. But if I pour the water, I’m guilty,” Jo said. “There are many cases in which owners served green tea, and ended up paying a 500,000 won fine.”

In addition to the regulatory issues raised in the Joongang Daily article, I would simply note the reality of the mobile broadband revolution, ignited in Korea with the arrival of Apple's iPhone in late 2009.  The fact that people can easily use their Android devices, iPhones or tablet computers in coffee shops and public wi-fi hotspots all over the country, has undoubtedly lessened their interest in PC Bangs.

CNN Executive on Mobile News and The Need for Original Content

As noted in a Joongang Daily article today, Tony Maddox, 50, executive vice president and managing director of CNN International, based at CNN’s headquarters in Atlanta, believes that not many people sit in front of the television to watch scheduled news and that is why CNN doesn’t feel threatened by the introduction of social media but “embraces them.”   As readers of this blog may know, I've been interested in television news for a long time.  It was the topic of my doctoral dissertation at Stanford, which later was expanded into my first book, Television's Window on the World, which is still available via many bookstores and can be downloaded free of charge from Google Books.  The book examines ten years of U.S. network television coverage of international affairs back in the pre-CNN, pre-internet era.  My interest in television news continued over the years, and I wrote two Headline Series monographs for the Foreign Policy Association, the latest of which was The Internet and Foreign Policy.

Now, back to the Joongang Daily article based on an interview with CNN's Tony Maddox. Today's consumers, he said, are not going to tie themselves to scheduled TV news. "They want TV news when they want it, on the go."



Maddox explained that as a result of the expanding platform of the Internet and mobile and iPad applications, to meet soaring demand, “more people access CNN content and read, listen and watch stories today than at any point in history.”

Under Maddox’s direction, CNN has been spending “enormous sums of money” since 2007 to add more correspondents to cover the world, which he said was in contrast to other media companies that have been reducing the number of foreign correspondents to cut back on expenses.



This is a move, Maddox said, that CNN has taken to “distinguish itself in the marketplace” in such an era in which everyone can say they are a reporter by having a mobile phone in hand.



The basic points made by Maddox apply not only to news, but to other forms of information as well. Despite the flood of information unleashed by the internet and the rapid spread of mobile devices, people everywhere long for high quality, accurate, trustworthy and credible information.

A Push for Browser Dirversity in Korea: Cracks in the Microsoft Monoculture?

An excellent article in The Wall Street Journal today by Evan Ramstad.  Entitled appropriately "At Last:  A Push for Browser Diversity in Korea," it reports on the somewhat amazing effort by the Korean government to wean people off their heavy dependence upon Microsoft's IE6 browser and to encourage use of Firefox, Chrome and other browsers.

As the article notes,South Korea’s major Internet portals and government regulators are trying to pull the country’s Internet users into the 21st century. How? With a campaign to wean South Koreans off a decade-old Microsoft Corp. browser and some related security technology that is way out of date.

The campaign seeks to fix the essential contradiction in South Korea’s technology environment — the government in the late 1990s built amazing broadband infrastructure all over the country, but in 1999 imposed rules that locked users to Microsoft’s Internet Explorer and an encryption method that made them vulnerable to hacking and software viruses.

I highly recommend that you read the entire article by Ramstad.