ABSTRACT:

It All Started with a Bang: The Role of
PC Bangs in South Korea's Cybercultures
Inkyu Kang (Penn State University-Erie)

This chapter explores the evolution of Korea's cybercultures, focusing on the role of PC bangs and online gaming that elevated the country to one the world's most wired nations in less than a decade in the late 1990s and early 2000s. Special attention is given to the unique discourses of the computer in terms of "study tool," "future technology," and even "progress" itself when the machine was introduced in Korea (Yoon, 2001, p. 254). This chapter examines how such discursive, symbolic aspects have influenced the adoption and use of PCs and on the subsequent development of PC bangs.

This essay focuses on the sociocultural forces many traditional approaches have failed to address. For example, the emergence of the PC bang has been widely seen as a sudden, new phenomenon arising around the 1997 Asian financial crisis, fueled mainly by the economic motivations of the government, the information technology (IT) industry, and laid-offs looking for business opportunities (Herz, 2002). These factors have undoubtedly contributed to Korea's Internet boom, but the explosion of PC bangs and online gaming cannot be fully explained without considering the sociocultural elements: the popularity of commercial places with the familiar bang (room) suffix, discourses of generational division ('If you don't play StarCraft, you are an old geezer.'), and negative implications of game consoles influenced by Confucian values of education as well as nationalism, to name a few. 1

Korea's distinctive gaming culture with emphasis on how the PC has become the dominant gaming platform will also be discussed in this essay. Many game consoles were introduced in Korea, including Game Boy, PlayStation, and Xbox, but they did not take off in the country. By investigating the marginalization of game consoles, which has rarely happened in other countries, it attempts to critically examine Korea's unique gaming environment such as the massive popularity of MMORPGs (massively multiplayer online role-playing games), nationally-televised gaming leagues as well as the peculiar space of PC bangs, where online and offline experiences are readily mixed, with interesting results. Unlike conventional approaches, this chapter attempts to shed light on the impact of society and culture on technology rather than vice versa.

1. Consoles have been seen as "game machines" in Korea with no educational overlap as opposed to the PC that was successfully marketed as a "study tool." Another reason for the unpopularity of console gaming was the acrimonious relationship between Korea and Japan. Most of the game consoles were manufactured in Japan, and Japanese-made consumer electronics "have traditionally been all but verboten thanks to both trade policy and cultural resentment" (Herz, 2002). There was also a strict ban in Korea on many Japanese imports, which was an effort by the military regimes to protect domestic products. The import ban was lifted in 1998, but the measure did not bring a dramatic change to the video game console market.

Inkyu Kang is an Assistant Professor of Journalism at Penn State-Erie, The Behrend College. He holds a PhD in Communication Arts from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Kang teaches communication and media courses including Media and Society, Applications for Media Writing and Introduction to Multimedia Production. Before joining Penn State, he taught East Asia-related courses at the University of Wisconsin including Modern Korea, Korean Popular Culture, and Korean Culture and Civilization. Kang's major research interests are cultural studies and new media technologies, and he is particularly interested the social shaping of technology in Korea and Japan. Kang is also an award-winning journalist/interpreter. As a journalist, he has been writing extensively about technology and culture, some of which were published as an anthology in 2008. As a translator, he translated Daniel Chandler's Semiotics: The Basics (2003, London: Routledge) into Korean.