Reinventing East Asia

A Broadband Heaven or Hyper-surveillant Nation? A Case of South Korea
Lee, Kwang-Suk (이광석 李光錫), a Australian Research Council postdoctoral research fellow at the University of Wollongong
 
Focal Point: Reinventing East Asia Speaker series
Thursday, February 17 2011
Public Lecture: 4pm -5:30pm (126 GSLIS Building)
Small Group Discussion: 12pm-1Pm (341 GSLIS Building)
 
Lecture Abstract:
 
S-Korea has been dubbed as a ‘broadband heaven’, one of the most wired nation, while it has been entering into the more advanced and routinized phases of cyberspace control in terms of the government’s convolution of surveillance and censorship with the Chaebols and the telcos. Lee aims to alert the new emerging and normalizing mechanisms of social control in South Korea in terms of online media surveillance. He will introduce the online surveillance techniques by which the government has gradually become ubiquitous power to spread its micro-tentacles into controlling each citizen. Theoretically, using Michael Foucault’s concept of ‘disciplinary societies’ and Gilles Deleuze’s updated concept of ‘control societies’, Lee will see how the techniques of power have been upgraded and even intensified, on the basis of a distributed and ubiquitous network model of control. In details, Lee will critically investigate S-Korea’s recent regulatory polices and surveillant practices controlling the citizens, owing to speed and broadband mobility on the Internet.
 
Speaker Bio:
 
Lee, Kwang-Suk (이광석 李光錫) earned his Ph.D. in Radio-TV-Film Department at the University of Texas at Austin. Lee is an assistant professor in the Graduate School of Public & Information Technology at Seoul National University of Science & Technology, Seoul. He has been also working as as an ARC (Australian Research Council) research fellow for conducting a 4-year long-term study of Internet History in Australia and the Asia-Pacific. His research areas include global media, Internet studies, critical geographies, surveillance, cultural industries, and alternative media. He is the author of four books, IT development in Korea: A Broadband Nirvana (London: Routledge, forthcoming), The Art & Cultural Politics of Cyber Avant-gardes (Seoul, 2010), Digital Paradoxes: The Political Economy of Cyberspace (Seoul, 2000) and Cultural Politics in Cyberspace (Seoul, 1998). Lee’s scholarly writing has appeared, including Media, Culture & Society, The International Communication Gazette, The International Journal of Cultural Policy, Info, The Government Information Quarterly, and The Information Society. As a columnist, Lee has contributed numerous columns and essays related to the digital society to Korean newspapers, magazines, and the like.