antikoan

 |::| Tuesday, September 03, 2002

 |::| The Real Reason We Don't Have Broadband?  12:35:45 PM 

From the August issue of Wired, on the culture of broadband in South Korea [printable version - single screen]:

...[T]he real allure of high-rise broadband [in South Korea] is escape from the constraints of real estate. Escape into the wide horizons of a computer game, or into the welcoming company of other micro-apartment dwellers $150; preferably at the same time. Not only is South Korea a more wired country than the US, it is also a more gregarious one. Even if most Koreans had an American-style mega home-theater cocoon, they would still go out. These people do not bowl alone, particularly if they're single (most don't move out of their parents' place until they get married). They want to be with their friends. [emphasis added]

It's a good start. A Korean grad student at RPI once told me, "The first thing Koreans do when they immigrate into a place is to build a church." By which he meant the actual church building, a place where they all took their families every Sunday and usually one or more times during the week.

A couple of years later, I bounced that off of a Ph.D. candidate I met at the University of Rochester, who was doing ethnographic research in Korean churches in America. He nodded knowingly, and added that the heavy church-orientation sometimes had a tendency to alienate their brighter children. They were expected to have such an involvement with the church that they felt stifled, unable to integrate into American society, and often ended up rejecting their richly interconnected extended families in pursuit of ... something. Freedom, maybe.

Whatever the reason (and I'd tend to suspect Korean internalism and, frankly, chauvinism, are rooted in Korea's contested position between [near-modern] Mongolia, Japan and China), Koreans are intensely family-oriented, and intensely focused on doing things in groups -- even in making individual achievements in groups. They've been occupied or fought over for thousands of years, so it's reasonable to expect them to develop strong cultural protective mechanisms.

Hertz goes on to say:

Arguably, it is the tight-knittedness of Korean society, and its people's tendency to physically gather around technology, that makes [the networked-play RPG] Lineage and the PC baangs a success. Unsurprisingly, Lineage hasn't taken off in North America, partly because it's a game in which not everyone can be the boss.

In other words, there are characteristics of Korean society (at least, South Korean) that build a bridge between the sensorily isolating world of reality-simulation and the real social reality that is created by culture.

But she continues:

More fundamentally, the distance between Americans, physically and socially, makes it impossible to replicate the contagiousness of the game, which is also the contagiousness of PC baangs in South Korea and of broadband overall in the country. In the US, going online is not generally a group social experience and almost never a face-to-face social experience -- in fact, we presume that if you're online, you're not talking to someone who's in the room.

It's interesting to me that she chooses to give material concerns precedence over cultural/social. I'm not saying she hasn't got grounds to; she's been a firsthand witness to a great deal of growth in multi-player, network-facilitated RPGs over the last few years. And it would be foolish to suppose that technology can't drive culture. But it seems to me that it would be similarly foolish to take an example that so clearly revolves around culture and see it in primarily commercial terms.

Which Herz proceeds to do in closing the piece:

So what about those of us in channel-surfing American cocoon-land? The vision of streaming media piped into the home, video-on-demand 24/7, and needle-narrow target markets is heralded as the way forward. Yet it is possible that this vision is holding us back. Perhaps the real market opportunities have nothing to do with connecting people to the Universal back catalog and everything to do with connecting people to each other. If Seoul is any kind of signpost, the way forward does not lie in the single servings of media we consume but in the playgrounds we share -- no matter who's manning the turrets and storming the castles.

One starts to suspect that perhaps the writer begins to play to the editor, sneaking in the obligatory WiReD sop to free-market capitalism. But I think there's a deeper disconnect at work, in that I don't think Herz really gives weight to the degree to which gaming has been modified by Korean culture, rather than vice versa.

Like many who focus on "gaming-as-culture", Herz seems to me to miss the fact that people participate in more than one culture at a time -- or, to put it another way, "culture" in the modern world is not a cleanly delimited thing. Your identity as "a gamer" is not really extricable from your identity as "a jew", "an Italian-American", "a Christian", "an Atheist", or "a bowler." But some cultural complexes are dominant. For most Americans -- and especially for caucasian middle-class Americans -- those complexes are usually self-selected or self-defined. For many Americans, such as zero- or first-generation immigrants and members of strongly-identified ethnic groups (Irish, Armenian, Korean, whatever), the dominant cultural complex will be ethnic. The history of American social life is largely the history of the erosion of those cultural complexes. Even brutally obvious exceptions, such as the many and varied African-American cultural complexes, can be used to illustrate this dynamic through the complex dance of assimilation and reverse-assimilation.

(More on J. C. Herz: http://www.peterme.com/archives/00000207.html, http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/bios/herz.html.)