Abstract
In winter 2016–2017, South Korea fascinated international observers with massive peaceful rallies, which gathered hundreds thousands—and sometimes millions—of candle-holding protesters for 17 consecutive Saturdays in downtown Seoul, resulting in the ousting of president Park Geun-hye. Jiyeon Kang’s timely book tracks how the South Korean practice of candlelight protests emerged out of Internet-born youth activism in the first decade of the 21st century. The book focuses on two key moments: the emergence of massive candlelight rallies in 2002 as vigils for two schoolgirls killed by a US military vehicle whose operators were acquitted by a US court-martial and their maturation in 2008 with protests against renewed importation of US beef, which was feared to be contaminated with “mad cow” disease. Aiming to explain “the nature of these Internet-born mass gatherings” and understand “the young Koreans in the streets” (p. 4), the book relies on 60 ethnographic interviews with those who attended the protests and participated in relevant Internet forums, close readings of online ephemera, and contextualization of the protests and their participants within South Korean politics and social practices.
At the heart of Kang’s account are two intertwined concepts: captivation and cultural ignition. Captivation, which draws on anthropologist Alfred Gell’s work on art, refers to how certain stories and images draw intense attention by latching onto underarticulated sentiments and becoming metonymic for larger issues, such as bewilderment at how a trial over deaths of two South Korean children on South Korean territory could completely exclude South Korean participants in the case of 2002 protests. Internet users exponentially accelerate circulation of such stories and images by linking and re-posting them. Kang posits such Internet-enabled collective captivation as a “new modality of politics” (p. 8). She argues that politics of captivation relies on collective knowledge, displays collective dynamics, and advances a collective agenda, but neither conforms to existing political norms, nor requires intentionally political actors, nor forms stable alliances. Cultural ignition refers to such fleeting mobilizations, and the term is inclusive of mobilizations beyond online spaces, shifting focus to resultant alliances, shared experiences, and vernacular politics.
The book is organized into two parts, which are preceded by Introduction and Chapter 1, where theoretical, methodological, and historical contexts are laid out. Part I covers the Internet-born youth activism in the aftermath of the two girls’ tragic deaths in 2002, its temporary convergence with mainstream politics around a presidential election, and retrospective narratives of the events’ participants. It argues that the 2002 vigils inaugurated a new repertoire for youth activism, whose signatures were “online mobilization, casual participation, and the format of a peaceful and festive crowd” (p. 85), in a stark contrast from the protests of previous decades, which drew committed activists who knowingly risked being tear-gassed, arrested, and tortured. Kang’s emphasis on the enabling role of the Internet is balanced with her attention to the South Korean context, namely, how critical sociopolitical awareness was inculcated via high school curriculum, and how the 2002 candlelight vigils were informed by the corporeal memories of, first, school training camps, whose rites involved lit candles and cathartic expressions, and, second, of the 2002 Soccer World Cup, co-hosted by South Korea and marked by massive, festive, and peaceful gatherings in downtown Seoul.
Part II turns to the candlelight protests of 2008. Triggered by fear of contaminated beef from the United States, protesters soon were expressing broad dissent against neoliberalization policies. Kang shows that candlelight gatherings had consolidated as “a natural response to perceived injustice” (p. 116) and grew more irreverent and festive, becoming candlelight festivals (p. 110). Kang’s larger claim is that political experiences and expectations of long-term Internet users became reshaped by the Internet’s logic—“the circulation of captivating objects, the affective networks and temporary alliances surrounding those objects, and the irreverent subversion of authority without fear of persecution” (p. 130). Kang demonstrates this point with fascinating details on how online parody informed offline protest tactics and responses to police violence. Long-term effects of Internet-born candlelight festivals are revealed via retrospective interviews. These show that the events made the teenagers who experienced them attentive to politics and, for street participants, left them longing for an alternative community—even though most pursued conventional life paths after the protests ebbed.
While particularly exciting to scholars of South Korean media and protest culture, Igniting the Internet makes important contributions to studies of new media and its influence on contemporary activism in general. Kang’s study weighs into the debate about the nature of Internet-mediated political participation (Castells, 2012; Fuchs, 2012; Morozov, 2009), especially when, in the Conclusion, Kang critiques the technologically determinist inflections of the questions asked about the role of the Internet in the Arab Spring and the Occupy movement. She proposes to reorient inquiries toward an empirical analysis sensitive to local politics and cultural meanings. Tellingly, the “fundamental questions” she suggest for grasping Internet-born activism are applicable to pre-Internet protests as well, with the exception of the question about convergences of online and offline spaces, which is still about placing online activities within offline contexts rather than fetishizing the Internet technology.
The book assuredly succeeds as an account of South Korean Internet-born civic activism, although Kang’s theorization of online mobilizations could be usefully expanded by attention to how it is not only social injustices that young Internet users get captivated with. South Korean Internet also becomes ignited over actual or alleged transgressions of famous or ordinary individuals, and irreverent critique is known to slide into hate speech and cyberbullying (e.g. Shim, 2014). Such online practices thrive on websites devoted to celebrity and humor, where, Kang mentions, parodic forms of youths’ critiques also originate and activist ignition starts. Elaborating on those connections could have further nuanced our understanding of captivation dynamics and put Kang’s research into an interesting dialogue with the growing literature on how initially apolitical subcultures of the Internet become sites for political mobilizing (e.g. Coleman, 2014). But such engagements would perhaps dilute the book’s sharp focus on the two history-making Internet-born mobilizations and their long-term implications, whose clarification is valuable in itself. South Korea has pioneered adoption of new media for two decades, yet media scholars have taken little heed of South Korean experiences—and Kang’s book goes a long way in demonstrating their critical relevance for ongoing debates. Igniting the Internet will be rewarding for students and scholars of new media in South Korea and beyond, while a must-read for analysts of Internet-mediated activism.