ABSTRACT
The mobile revolution in Korea started earlier than the overall global trend and had a large impact on the nation’s digital development. However, two seemingly contradictory aspects of this revolution reveal much about both the country’s strengths and its relative weaknesses in building its part of the global information society. On the one hand, its hardware and networks quickly became cutting-edge technology of a sort, with South Korea becoming the fi rst nation in the world to introduce nationwide CDMA networks, mobile television, and mobile WiMAX (WIBRO). On the other hand, Korea ironically lagged about two and a half years behind many other countries of the world in the actual adoption and use of mobile broadband, compared with what people in other nations were doing with the iPhone, Android phones and other smart phones. This created what has been variously referred to as the “iPhone shock” or “smart-phone shock” in South Korea, beginning in November of 2009.
