Cell Phones and Broadband 'Net Win in S. Korea

McLuhanesque writes "The Globe and Mail has an interesting column on how text messaging and the use of effective broadband internet content helped propel an obscure lawyer, Mr. Roh Moo-hyun, from a perpetual also-ran to become South Korea's new president. 'With the world's highest penetration of high-speed and mobile Internet services, South Korea is at the cutting edge of technology that is transforming the political system, making it more open and democratic. It could be a preview of the shape of Western democracy,' the article says."

Comments

How many times...

[Anonymous Coward]

...do we have to go through this?

1. South Korea is a small country with the vast majority of it's population in a high density urban area (Seoul).

2. And probably more importantly, South Korea has just recently become industrialized, therefore the communications infrastructure is quite modern compared to other Western, developed countries.

Do we really need to hear about this on a weekly basis? I guess the slashdot editors don't read their own site.

Re:Language is still a barrier

[Anonymous Coward]

While koreans do use chinese idiograms for some things, their alphabet is a real one (i.e, a small number of characters stand for sounds smaller than whole words.) There are 24 of them (28 if you count some archaic characters, I think).

Re:Language is still a barrier

[minko]

You can't possibly imagine how fast one can type Korean characters before you see it. Average Korean teenagers can type 100-200 characters per minute not only with keyboards but also with cell phones(using their two thumbs). Korean is really well-suited for technology.

do you even know korean ??

[Anonymous Coward]

But Korean is not written linearly letter
by letter! It is written in grouped syllables;
if you had any familiarity at all with Korean,
you'd know this!?

Korean has the worst mess in all Unicode, I'd say.
(a) The individual letters are in Unicode, and the
jambo syllables are *also* in Unicode
(b) And of course they have the Chinese (kanja)

I'm not knocking the Korean alphabet; they are
justifiably proud of it, and it is beautiful.
But it is not as easy to deal with on a computer!

What is a Unicode code point ?
(a) each leter, counting doubled consonants
as doubled code points
(b) each letter, except doubled consonant
letters are a single code point
(c) each jambo syllable

#c makes glyph work & editors *much* easier,
but makes letter-based analysis much more painful

Re:look at the difference

[interiot]

There are a couple reasons to favor Honads/Toyotas over less established brands. Because they're more established and well known, you're more likely to get a higher resale value for those cars (though things can always change given 5 years). Also, toyota and honda in particular try very very hard to get top spots in consumer satisfaction surveys since they're neck-and-neck elsewhere, so if something really major goes wrong with those cars, even if the warranty has run out, you can get them to replace it on their dime because they don't want to lose you and your friends' loyalty.

Not that Honda/Toyota/other established brands are by any means necessarily the best, just that brand recognition can factor into a buyer's decision, and there's no reason to poo-poo that.

Re:Not Dollar But Won

[Anonymous Coward]

$1 amounts to some 1200 korean won

Re:Wait a minute

[nulleffect]

According to Roh's site, he made 7,278,135,098 Won (about USD 6,000,000) from 203,764 donations, not CAD 1,000,000,000 (about USD 640,000,000) from 180,000 donors, as the article says.

Re:Language is still a barrier

[Flakeloaf]

A two-finger typing system actually makes sense in Korean, where most phonemes are written as one-vowel-one-consonant digraphs. (or was that dipthongs...)

For the unitiated, Korean writing is (mostly) phonetic. A vowel is matched with a consonant to form a phoneme, and these sounds are arranged to form words in a very sensible manner.

Characters are usually pronounced exactly as they are written - the only exception my round eye has seen so far is that syllables that begin with vowels are instead preceded by the symbol that would otherwise be spoken as "ioong": O.

Although the language is read left-to-right, consonant or vowel sounds are sometimes written one on top of the other instead of side-by-each for aesthetic reasons. "Lee" would be initial vowel + | ("ee") for O|. "Boo" is simply B (|_|) and "oo" (T) linked together:

|_|
T

It's a dead easy alphabet to learn, and anyone with an hour and a pencil can learn to read (and more importantly, write) Korean phonetically.

blah, blah, blah...