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This may sound irrelevant, but in my office I sometimes listen to a regular lecture by Marti Hearst, an associate professor in the School of Information at the University of California at Berkeley on "Search Engines: Technology, Society, and Business." I can download his latest 1-hour-40-minute lecture files by connecting an iPod to my notebook. Strapped with earphones, I can feel as if I were in a lecture hall of UC Berkeley.
There is a fad in America for an online service called iTunes U. Launched in May, it makes available online thousands of lectures by renowned academics from some 30 universities including Duke, MIT, Stanford, Yale and UC Berkeley. Korean iPod users can also listen for free to lectures that would otherwise cost them tens of thousands of dollars annually. Prof. Nick Burnett, chair of the Department of Communication Studies at California State University in Sacramento, stopped all his classroom lectures early this month, and replaced them with lectures on iTunes U.
One of the keywords in Korean society this year was "UCC", short for ¡°user-created content.¡± It was to be nothing short of a media revolution: ordinary people, so the idea was, would no longer be passive consumers of information but become active creators, making their own using camcorders or blogging. Early this year, all presidential hopefuls launched UCC teams in the firm conviction that the presidential election would be determined on the Internet.
It was not to be. Just as the BBK investment scandal, which was to be the ¡°single stroke¡± felling Grand National Party candidate Lee Myung-bak, proved a damp squib, so the online efforts had no tangible impact on the campaign. One presidential candidate who had overwhelming support in the "blogosphere" ended up winning far fewer votes than expected.
Korean service providers are still racking their brains for ways to make ends meet, though they invested massively in anticipation of booming business during the presidential election campaign. Some people suspect it was just a passing fad in the IT industry and ¡°UCC¡± a storm in a teacup.
A majority of domestic sites were filled with poor and insubstantial content that aimed only at stimulating people's emotions. The portals and video clip sites were inundated with politically-charged content created by each presidential candidate's camp, with corporate-sponsored content poorly disguised as created by ordinary netizens, or with entertainment content simply parodying celebrities. In other words, the crisis of the UCC sites is the crisis of the Korean-style model, not of the concept itself.
The Korea Internet Corporations Association, a gathering of domestic Internet companies, named Korea¡¯s crumbling status as an Internet superpower at the top of the list of Internet news of 2007. This was a warning: despite its rapid growth, the Korean Internet industry delivers poor content. UCC can have no future that way. To be truly beneficial, these sites should offer something more substantial, such as lectures from Seoul National University or the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST), or footage of the president chairing Cabinet meetings.
This column was contributed by Hwang Soon-hyun from the Chosun Ilbo's Internet News Desk.
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