Korea's Online Aggression a Taste of the Future?

DerGeist writes "Imagine your life ruined by an organized mob that convicts with scant, unreliable evidence. Fueled only by hearsay and rumors, an invisible horde of your fellow citizens begins bombarding your snailbox, email, phone, work, school and family with threats, insults and general harassment. You are forced to drop out of school and quit your job as a result of constant attacks. You are shunned and ridiculed in public as anywhere you go, you are instantly recognized. Although it may seem to be just a second-rate Hollywood nightmare scenario reminiscent of "The Net," this sort of "organized mob" justice is being dealt out freely in South Korea where net usage is booming. So freely, in fact, that almost 1 in 10 of 13-65 year-olds has felt its sting. Could this trend hit the U.S.? Will policing net behavior eventually become necessary?"

Comments

Old News

[Pike]

I couldn't help thinking that Poe (others too, probably) already thought of this 150 years ago, specifically in Some Words With a Mummy , written in 1850.

"We then spoke of the great beauty and importance of Democracy, and were at much trouble in impressing the Count [the mummy] with a due sense of the advantages we enjoyed in living where there was suffrage ad libitum, and no king.

"He listened with marked interest, and in fact seemed not a little amused. When we had done, he said that, a great while ago, there had occurred something of a very similar sort. Thirteen Egyptian provinces determined all at once to be free, and to set a magnificent example to the rest of mankind. They assembled their wise men, and concocted the most ingenious constitution it is possible to conceive. For a while they managed remarkably well; only their habit of bragging was prodigious. The thing ended, however, in the consolidation of the thirteen states, with some fifteen or twenty others, in the most odious and insupportable despotism that was ever heard of upon the face of the Earth.

"I asked what was the name of the usurping tyrant.

"As well as the Count could recollect, it was Mob."

Re:Don't Mess with Korean Superstars

[Zontar_Thing_From_Ve]

I don't think this has anything to do with the fact that they "teched-up" rapidly before online etiquette was formed. This has more to do with emotion-driven Korean culture.

I don't have a link, but maybe 2 months ago I read about a similar story in China where an online mob seriously harassed a married woman and a man she was supposedly having an affair with before it became known that the woman's estranged husband made up everything just to get back at her and none of it was true. I'd say it's really an Asian thing as opposed to a Korean thing.