ABSTRACT
South Korea now leads the world in terms of Internet use, with 77.8 percent of the population identified as Internet users (KISA and KCC, 2010). Based on highly developed technological infrastructures, the Internet has been broadly used for progressive and oppositional civic actions and political campaigns in Korea since the 1990s. While a number of previous studies have analyzed the political uses of the Internet, most tend to focus more on the Internet as a “tool” of mobilization mainly adopted by “established institutions,” including social movement organizations (SMOs) and political parties. But this tendency will likely to fail to explain new, significant phenomena arising in Internet-based activism fields.
