Fighting in the shadow of the past: The mobilizing role of vernacular memories of the 1987 pro-democracy movement in the 2008 candlelight protests in Korea

The dynamics of collective memory in the age of digital media

According to Maurice Halbwachs (1950[1992]), collective memory is memory constructed and shared by social groups. His theory suggests that such memories of the past are shaped by present interests, needs, and concerns. Following Halbwachs, scholars argue (Schwartz 1991; Zelizer, 1995) that collective memory is an anchoring process in which the past is used to interpret the present and the present to interpret the past. As such, collective memory is an ongoing process of negotiation between different groups and across different points in time and space, and can be used to “defend different aims and agendas” (Zelizer, 1995: 226). In other words, scholars argue that collective memories are not merely an act of recalling the past event, but they are a social, cultural, and political action that constantly takes on different nuances, interests, and complications (Zelizer, 1998). They are often fabricated, rearranged, elaborated, and omitted of details and used to “accommodate broader issues of identity formation, power and authority, and political affiliation” (Zelizer, 1998: 3).

As Olick (1999) points out, collective memories “are usually accounts of the memories of some subsets of the group, particularly of those with access to the means of cultural production or whose opinions are more highly valued” (pp. 338–339). This suggests that the production and circulation of the collective memory of any group or society always reflects power relations. Thus, what may be central to the discussion of collective memory is an articulation of power: whose memory it is, how it contributes to represent the interest of a certain group, and how it mutes voices and memories of others. In this lieu, scholars have made distinctions of memories such as between archival and living memory and between official and vernacular memory. According to Bodnar (1992, 1994), public memory is located in the intersection of official and vernacular cultural expressions. He argues that while official views emerge from the concerns of cultural leaders and authorities of society, vernacular memories reflect diverse and changing interests of communities that are “grounded in parts of the whole” (Bodnar, 1994: 75). According to this dichotomy, official memories are used to muffle the voices of competing interests, reproduce the structure of power, and to maintain the stability of society. Relying on “dogmatic formalism” (Bodnar, 1994: 75), these memories present the reality in ideal, abstract terms that consecrate the past and the present (Bodnar, 1992, 1994). On the contrary, vernacular memories reflect voices of “ordinary” people who do not have means to systematically produce and reproduce the cultural meaning of the past. Bodnar (1992) argues that because vernacular memories are grounded in the firsthand experience of a community, they are more authentic, intimate, complex, and diverse than official memories (Confino, 2006). In this context, vernacular memories are often considered as alternative to official memories, articulating different versions of stories of those who do not have power in the process of cultural production.

Despite this dialectic prevalent in the scholarly discussions of collective memory, it is important to caution that the construct of the “vernacular” has often been criticized and the boundary between the “official” and the “vernacular” itself is ambiguous and often crossed (Confino, 2006; Howard, 2008). Critics argue that while the “vernacular” is not clearly defined, it is often associated with concepts like marginality, counter-hegemony, and empowerment of the “ordinary” (Howard, 2005). According to Howard (2008), such conceptualization of the vernacular fails to recognize its hybrid characteristics. In his study of vernacular discourse on the web, Howard argues that while the demarcation from the dominant, institutional discourse is central to the conceptualization of the vernacular, vernacular voices often co-opt institutional discourse to claim its alterity and because “the vernacular generates meaning by being rendered distinct from the institutional, it is inherently hybrid” (p. 508). From these discussions, it can be argued that “vernacular” discourse is a hybrid that often co-opts the institutional, official, and the hegemonic and produces a new, alternative meaning. As Howard (2008) argues, such hybrid discourses are prevalent in the age of digital media in which Internet users can more actively participate in the process of cultural production and public discourse than before.

The interconnection between technological changes and the dynamics of memory has drawn attention from many scholars. For example, according to Van Dijck (2007), different media technologies can produce and reproduce “a sense of past, present, and future of ourselves in relation to others” (p. 21). Similarly, Van House and Churchill (2008) argue that both individual and collective memory “depends in part on technologies of memory and the associated sociotechnical practices, which are changing radically” (p. 296). With the increasing electronic connectivity and constant mediation and remediation of the past, thus, “our sense of a collective past has been transformed” (Hoskins, 2001: 334). In this changing technological context, Hoskins (2009: 92) argues for the notion of “digital network memory,” which “highlights the dynamics of mediated memory as something created when needed, driven by the connectivities of digital technologies and media, and inextricably forged through and constructive of social networks.” Expanding this argument, Van Dijck (2010) further suggests that the notion of connectivity has become crucial to our understanding of culture itself. In this culture of connectivity, the boundaries between the present and the past, the private and the public, “the totalizing and the contextual, the permanent and the ephemeral, the archive and narrative” are often blurred (Hoskins, 2009: 93). These previously distinct modes of cultural memory often coexist and co-evolve in the digital media space (Hoskins, 2009). That is, the old dynamics of what counts as memory, how it is remembered, and who articulates the memory are now being constantly contested and redefined.

Drawing from this, this article examines the dynamics between the official and the vernacular, and between the archival and the living in the digital media space. Through the case study of the candlelight protests, I address how netizens, through constant connections and exchanges of perspectives, collectively appropriated the past pro-democracy movement that had been primarily commemorated in the “official” realm and created an alternative discourse, co-opting the institutional discourse of the protests and the past movements. In this article, the core of the “vernacular” is viewed as its alterity in terms of content, communication channel, and the people who produce the content. Based on this, this case study discusses the role of vernacular memory characterized with concreteness, corporeality, and multiplicity in initiating, defining, and expanding political actions in the digital media space.

Contextualizing the candlelight protests of 2008 in South Korea

Before moving into the discussion of how vernacular memories of the past played a role in the candlelight protests, it is important to put the protests in context to fully understand the significance of the events in Korean history. The candlelight protests started as a public resistance against the government’s decision on US beef imports because of public health concerns. In other words, at least in the beginning, it was this consumer sentiment that dominated the rhetoric of the protests. Participants explicitly limited the issue to the risk of mad cow disease in US beef and framed the events as a “non-political” protest concerning this specific issue. However, as the protests progressed, it expanded its concerns to the issues of democracy, the government’s neoliberal economic and educational policies, and national sovereignty.

At first glance, it might be puzzling why the issue of US beef imports has sparked such an intense public outrage. One of the direct reasons for the amplification of the issue was a news program called PD Diary on one of the major national broadcasting systems (MBC) in Korea, which reported on possible mad cow disease risk from consuming US beef. Aired on 29 April 2008, the program showed images of staggering cows being dragged into a slaughterhouse and introduced a story of an American woman who had allegedly died from mad cow disease. This program immediately created public anger especially among teenagers who were concerned about how US beef would likely end up in their school lunches.

In addition to this prevalent concern with mad cow disease, the events were also intertwined with longstanding and emerging (geo)political tensions in the society. First, the treaty with the United States was made without public consensus from the beginning, which was considered by the Korean public as a violation of key principles of democracy. As the government failed to respond to public demand for renegotiation and decided to impose stronger policing on protesters instead, public frustration grew over the government, which did not listen to the voice of people, and over the system of representative democracy in general. Furthermore, as Lee et al. (2010) argue, “the stage was set” for the protests by the launch of new government’s economic and educational policies, which reflected “a deepening of Korea’s neoliberal turn” (p. 359). The conservative government announced the implementation of various economic and educational policies that encouraged competitions, privatization, and efficiency, which increased public concerns over polarization. Therefore, while the issue of US beef itself might sound trivial to cause such a commotion, it should be understood within a more complex political and economic context. Finally, the deal was taken in line with other “unfair” treaties with the United States after World War II, including the Statement of Forces Agreement (SOFA), which had been believed to favor the United States and created anti-American sentiment among Korean people in the past decades (Song, 2007). For example, in 2002, thousands of people held candlelight vigils for more than six months to commemorate two middle school girls who were accidently killed by a US tracked bridge carrier. Under the current SOFA, American military personnel’s crimes committed on duty in Korea should be handled by US military authorities, not by Korean law, which generated widespread public outrage at that time due to perceived unfairness. Similarly, the imports of allegedly unsafe US beef were understood by Koreans along with the historically “unfair” relationship between the two nations. Thus, the issue of US beef reflected multiple layers of geopolitical tensions that had existed in Korea before the protests, which in turn contributed to the unexpected intensification of the events.

During the candlelight protests, the Internet provided a space for netizens to set an agenda, voice their opinions, and collectively plan for actions. The discursive potential of the Internet as an alternative, vernacular “public sphere” in which “strangers develop and express public opinions by engaging one another through vernacular rhetoric” (Hauser, 1999: 12) has been examined by scholars in various disciplines (Dahlgren, 2005). With the nearly ubiquitous availability of the Internet, Korea has experienced radical changes in the media landscape in which three major conservative newspapers had dominated political discourse. For example, online news website OhmyNews has provided a hybrid model of citizen and traditional journalism in Korea, opening a new venue for alternative public opinions and for citizen participation in political issues (Song, 2007). In addition, from the early 2000s, Korean people have observed historically and politically important events mobilized by Internet discussions. One such event was candlelight vigils of 2002 introduced above. Another important political event was the presidential election of 2002 right after the candlelight vigils. As Chang (2005) argues, the election was “a pivotal event for the online media as they were transformed into the epicenter of political reform led by citizens mobilized online” (p. 925). According to Kang (2010: 135), netizens “overturned the historically established premises of the election” and made a considerable contribution to the election of progressive candidate Roh Moo-Hyun who fell behind other candidates by a large margin in the beginning of the race. During this process, sites like OhmyNews and Daum’s Agora (discussion forum) and Cafes (Internet communities) became central spaces in which netizens voiced and shared their opinions, which often took different perspectives from the conservative news media in Korea.

While not all major news media in Korea are conservative, three leading dailies—Chosun, Dong-A, and JoongAng—are known for their conservative stance. They had been the most influential news media in the nation and often criticized for their alleged connections with the authoritative regimes in the past and with business conglomerates known as chaebols. Their news articles and editorials are known for their pro-American, pro-liberal democracy, and anti-North Korean political positions (Song, 2007). With the rise of the Internet, however, they started to lose ground. In fact, during the 2008 protests, one of the widespread campaigns among netizens was to boycott the three newspapers. It was in this political context and changing mediascape that the Internet became as a space for citizens to create alternative meanings, voices, and discourses on the candlelight protests against the conservative mainstream newspapers.

In particular, Agora was one of the most popular forums to discuss the protests among netizens. An online petition made by an anonymous high school student calling for the president’s impeachment was posted on Agora and served as a driving force to initiate the protests, drawing 1.3 million signatures within a few weeks. Starting from this, the Internet forum became known as “the sacred place of democracy” among netizens. While anyone can participate in discussions on Agora, it is believed that teenagers and younger generations were the most active members to discuss the protests and related political issues especially in the beginning of the protests. Teenagers reportedly made up more than 50% of the participants in the first few series of candlelight protests, and the events soon drew other populations from diverse backgrounds, including college students, office workers, and housewives with their children.

Based on this context, I analyzed postings on Agora about the candlelight protests from May to August 2008, and examined how young netizens reconstructed memories of the 1987 movement and how this allowed discursive legitimacy to the present protests.

The vernacular appropriation of the official, archival memories

The pro-democracy movement in 1987 was immensely visible on the Internet during the 2008 candlelight protests. As a simple illustration, on Agora, there were more than 3000 postings that directly mentioned the JDM and more than 20,000 postings that contained related terms such as “democracy movement” and “autocracy,” from May to August, 2008. The sheer volume of the postings suggests the visibility of the topic on the Internet. In comparison, there were less than 100 postings about the JDM in 2007, the 20th anniversary of the event.

Considering that the majority of the participants were teenagers who did not experience the JDM, its link to the 2008 candlelight protests, which differed in characteristics and purposes, was socially and discursively constructed. Moreover, while the JDM resulted in a series of important political reforms in the country, the event had been moved to the realm of “official,” “archival,” and “institutional” memories. The 1987 movement was once a living memory for people who experienced the demonstrations on the street. The so-called 386 generation ¹ lived the age of student activism in the 1980s and their experience on the street was a living memory of the tumultuous struggle for democracy. However, as the country successfully adopted procedural democracy and radical market liberalization and experienced the Asian Financial Crisis (AFC) in the late 1990s, the living memory of the pro-democracy movements in the 1980s has lost its place in the public discourse. As an illustration, according to a survey conducted in 2007 in celebration of the 20th anniversary of the 1987 movement, only 3 out of 10 college students reportedly knew about the movement (The Ewha Weekly, 2007).

While the living memory of the JDM has gradually faded away, the event has entered the realm of official commemorations and archival memories. The government has held national ceremonies since 2007 to commemorate the victims of the protests and to celebrate the spirit of the movement. The event was introduced in the official history textbook, and the Korea Democracy Foundation was established in 2001 to commemorate pro-democracy movements in the past, including the JDM. The event has also been commemorated in “anniversary journalism” (Edy, 1999). Over time, the event gained a symbolic status in Korean political discourse as a political foundation of the nation and as a historical event representing a victory of the people and democracy. That is, while multifaceted, bodily, and living memories of the JDM gradually disappeared, the event has established its historical importance and been commemorated through national ceremonies, anniversary articles, documentaries, and books. In this sense, the 1987 pro-democracy movement went into the realm of what Pierre Nora (1996: 1) calls “lieux de mémoire” that has to be remembered with documents, archives, and anniversaries.

During the 2008 candlelight protests, however, the memory of the JDM was called upon and rearticulated in the vernacular discourse on the Internet. Personal, directly experienced, and concrete memories of the past became alive again, and they were collectively used as an interpretive frame to understand the current situation and as an orienting force to guide the direction of the candlelight protests. In this sense, the Internet served not only as a platform to create, collect, and preserve memories in response to an immediate “critical incident” (Zelizer, 1992: 4) but also as a space to evoke and reconstruct unarticulated narratives of the past that had been frozen in the official and archival memory. In the case of the candlelight protests, this “vernacular” memory of the past movement once again gained vividness and immediacy and was appropriated as a conceptual tool with which the present was interpreted.

During the candlelight protests, the link between the past movement and the present protest constituted a terrain of contention and netizens appropriated the official memories of the JDM as a vehicle to draw vernacular memories and to put the current protests in historical and political context. On the Internet, photographs and news articles of the 1987 movement were widely circulated, creating a hybrid space in which vernacular memories of the past were articulated in response to the archival documents of the event. In that hybrid space, the line between official and vernacular and between archival and living was fluid and easily crossed.

One example that can show such a dynamic is an iconic photograph of the JDM that captured the then-college student Lee Han-yeol’s “about-to-die” moment (Zelizer, 2010). Lee, who joined a student demonstration at his university on 9 June 9 1987, was severely injured by a gas grenade by military police, and he died of the wounds a month later. The black-and-white picture portrays the moment right after the grenade hit his skull. In the photograph, Lee’s eyes glazes over and he is bleeding on his head and his friend is holding his limp body from the back, suggesting his impending death. Taken by a Korean Reuter photojournalist, the image was first published on one of the major newspapers in Korea, JoongAng Daily, and later on the first page of New York Times. Once the photograph was published on JoongAng, it instantly prompted public outrage. Before this incident, another college student was killed during torture, which initiated a series of student demonstrations. The two symbolic deaths played an important role in expanding the student-led demonstrations to the nationwide social movement. Demonstrations rapidly gained momentum following the deaths, and the two students quickly became a symbol of the protests. When Lee died, over 1.6 million people participated in his national funeral, held on 9 July, which was a few weeks after the military regime finally gave in to the people’s demand for democratic reforms. Through this process, the death of Lee gained a symbolic status in contemporary Korean history and the photograph of his about-to-die moment also became iconic, providing a “rhetorical structure for remembering and judging”’ the event (Hariman and Lucaites, 2003: 62).

Over time, the iconic image of Lee became the image that recurrently appeared on the mainstream media in their anniversary articles, in documentaries, and books. While the line between the archival and the living, and between the official and the vernacular is not always crystal clear, the JDM had been remembered primarily through institutional efforts, leaving the multilayered, living, and bodily memories unarticulated. The photograph of Lee—once full of subtle contexts, meanings, and emotions—is an example of how the memories of the movement have been institutionalized, archived, and in a sense, frozen in history.

In this sense, it is ironic that the image was widely circulated among netizens on the Internet during the candlelight protests to evoke living memories of the past and the present. Not surprisingly, the spectacle of the image generated emotional responses from netizens. For the people who directly experienced the pro-democracy movement, the image served as a vehicle to bring their memories of the lived experience back. In response to one of the postings that included the picture of Lee, they responded: “I’ve never imagined I would see this picture again”; “It reminded me of 20 years ago. It’s still emotional”; “I am seeing the same passion that led to our victory on 29 June 1987” (“The 386 generation”, 2008). For the younger generation who did not directly experience the past movement, the image served to understand the past and to make sense of the present: “I can’t see this without tears. We will take the democracy back that our fathers have achieved with their blood” (“The 386 generation”, 2008).

In addition, the photographs of 1987 were often juxtaposed with the images and videos of the candlelight protests taken by citizens, especially the ones that portrayed citizen victims who were injured by policemen during the protests. One of the most widely circulated images juxtaposed with the picture of Lee was the photograph of a young girl bleeding with a smile on her face. First introduced on the Internet on 1 June 2008, the picture was quickly circulated and repeatedly recycled during the protests. Netizens nicknamed her “a patriotic girl” and the picture gained more popularity as an anonymous riot policeman dedicated a poem to the girl. Entitled as “Tears of a riot policeman,” the poem expresses a lamentation for the girl’s injury and his position as a riot policeman:

Sweetheart, why are you smiling? How could you smile as if your injury was like nothing?… I can’t understand you. How could you stand alone with your bear hands in front of my dirty combat boots? … I hate myself because I can’t do anything. I blame myself and I curse myself … I am sorry I couldn’t protect you … I call out “minjoo” with all the burning fire from my soul. That minjoo you love … I love you, minjoo. Minjoo, I love you.

In Korean, Minjoo is a homonym for a girl’s name and democracy. The phrase at the end, “with all the burning fire from my soul,” was directly taken from one of the most well-known poems in the 1970s and 1980s, which was an elegy for the unfulfilled dream of democracy in the nation. In this sense, the image of the girl insinuated that the protests were ultimately about democracy just like the JDM in the past. The girl was also called “Lee Han-yeol of 2008,” suggesting the connection between the two events. Although the intensities of pain were different—one portraying an impending death and the other depicting no such sign—the pain of the “patriot girl” was amplified, dramatized, and multiplied because it was read in relation to the pain of Lee.

Before the 2008 candlelight protests, the image of Lee was circulated primarily through historical documents. However, during the protests, netizens used the image to collectively articulate their own memories of the past that had been neglected in the institutional remembrance of the event. The photograph was also often juxtaposed with photographs of citizen victims during the candlelight protests, offering an interpretive framework to engage with the present. In the online discourse, the authority of the iconic photograph was borrowed to interpret photographs of the current events, signaling the historical importance of the present. In other words, during the candlelight protests, the established authority of the past event was appropriated in the present context. Conservative mainstream media voiced their concerns, arguing that netizens were insulting the spirit of the historical pro-democracy movement. One of the conservative newspapers, Dong-A Daily, argued in an editorial that the candlelight protests and the JDM were fundamentally different in that the first was initiated by US beef imports and the other was by citizens’ desire for democracy. For this reason, the editorial concluded that the people who were making the connection between the 1987 movement and the candlelight protests were the groups with partisan interests rather than ordinary citizens. Against this frame, the vernacular appropriation of the Lee’s death image and of the past movement in relation to the present gave netizens the discursive capacity to come up with an alternative interpretive scheme to understand the current event.

Articulating lived experiences: Personal narratives and hughis

While netizens were able to construct their own narratives, often in conjunction and competition with the conservative news media discourse, it should be noted that the 1987 movement was also a recurrent theme in the progressive news and scholarly discourse during the candlelight protests. For example, KyungHyang Daily (2008), one of the progressive newspapers in the nation, argued in an editorial that while there were some differences between 1987 and 2008, the link between the two events was the people’s demand for “democracy,” then for democratic political reforms and now for more participatory democracy. That is, the discourse of the 1987 movement was prevalent both on the Internet and on the mainstream media. How the past movement is articulated and interpreted in relation to the present movement, however, was a terrain of contention. Unlike mainstream media discourse on the JDM that discussed the movement often in abstract, rational, and historicizing terms, the vernacular articulation of the past was more concrete, expressive, often corporeal, and immediate to the present. The alterity of the vernacular discourse on the JDM and the candlelight protests on the Internet lied in its concreteness, corporeality, and plurality. Personal memories and experience collectively articulated on the Internet-enabled netizens to “commemorate concrete moments of communal experience and memorialize them as paradigms of shared identity” (Hauser, 1999: 17).

During the candlelight protests, the memories of the JDM and the living experience of the present event were articulated by netizens in various established genres of online discourse in Korea. One of the most popular forms of discussing the past was a narrative of personal experience and emotions. In parallel, personal experiences in the present were communicated in the form of hughi on the Internet, transliterated into “reviews.” This is an established genre in the Korean online sphere that talks about one’s bodily experience with a commercial product or with an event. While the genre started as a business strategy to draw consumer reviews just like Amazon.com reviews, it has become a distinctive genre in which netizens express their opinions, thoughts, and emotions and share testimonies about their experience in non-commercial realms in Korean public discourse. The genre had been one of the most prevalent online discursive forms to articulate netizens’ experience in other political actions, such as the 2002 candlelight vigils. That is, while it is a hybrid genre taking the form of commercial reviews, over time, it has become an established way of narrating and sharing netizens’ experiences in political events.

During the candlelight protests, personal narratives of the lived experiences of the past movement were articulated on the Internet. Although varied in forms, these personal narratives included a short introduction of who the writer was, what they had experienced in 1987, and how they thought about the candlelight protests, often in relation to their past experience. For example, in one of the Internet postings on Agora that attracted more than 4800 page views, one netizen narrated,

I am just an ordinary citizen in my 40s. Like all other people, I have a lot of regrets in my life. However, there is one thing that I have never regretted … In June, 1987, I was there. I called out, ‘Down with dictatorship!’ with everyone else on the street of Seoul … This experience has meant a lot to me … What if I weren’t there on that day? What would I think of myself now if I had been watching TV at home, then? … After Lee was elected as the president, I decided to leave the country. I didn’t want to live in a country where a person like him could become a president … To make it worse, the beef deal happened. I was upset. But with you guys, I see hope now. You remind me of the people in the demonstrations in 1987. Tonight, the first candlelight vigil will begin. I would like to feel the spark and passion of 1987 again. (“I am a middle aged man,” 2008)

As seen in this example, personal narratives of the past often included concrete experiences of the historic pro-democracy movement and personal emotions attached to the experience. To these postings, netizens often replied with short comments explaining their own experiences:

“I also remember that time. I was a middle school student. I couldn’t even breathe because of tear gas. That was my memory of the movement. I was too young to worry about politics back then but now I will fight”; “I am not living in Korea now. I am still ashamed of myself for not having joined the JDM in 1987. I will not be able to protest with you tonight but I promise I will join you sometime in the near future as long as the protest continues.” (“I am a middle aged man,” 2008)

These postings were a site of articulating personal experiences, collectively reconstructing the meaning of the past movement and sharing emotions about the present moment that reminded them of their experience in 1987. Concrete, diverse, and individual experiences of the past that could not be reduced to abstract terms of history were often expressed in their own vernacular stories on those postings. For instance, in one of the postings on Agora with more than 200,000 page views, a daughter of a 386er narrated her father’s experience of the past:

My father was eating his birthday breakfast that my grandma made for him when the police arrested him in 1987. He was taken to the interrogation room at a police station and was tortured there. In the next rooms, his friends were dying from torture … I can’t even imagine how scared it would have been for him. My father was only twenty years old. That’s what it took for him to achieve democracy. (President,) I tell you this with all my heart. This is the democracy that my father fought for with his life. Please don’t ruin it. Please don’t make our parents’ sacrifices worthless. (“My father’s democracy”, 2008)

These personal narratives of the past have not been fully articulated, shared, and discussed, as the event moved to the realm of institutional, archival, and official memories. Scholars, public officials, and student leaders have continued to discuss and celebrate the glorious past but particular, concrete, and multilayered textures of ordinary people’s experiences were hardly visible in the anniversary journalism, history textbooks, and official ceremonies. While the official history may suggest a closure of the past movement, personal memories of the event discursively reconstructed on the Internet provided a rhetorical capacity for netizens to talk about the past through the present and the present through the past.

Similarly, the lived experiences of the candlelight protests were also articulated and shared on the Internet in the form of hughis. This genre often contained testimonies about what the writer had eye-witnessed and experienced in the protests. For example, sharing her experience of joining the protest, one of the participants narrated in her hughi,

I wasn’t going to go because of the weather but I changed my mind in the afternoon. I left around 6:30 and I had to lie to my mom … When I got there, a lot of people were already there. We marched and shouted slogans together … What I realized from today’s experience was that the protest became more dynamic. It was a little more powerful than before. I hope the president will listen to our voices … Thank you all for your support and help today. You are the hope of our country (“Hughi of July 19th,” 2008).

While these postings were narratives of personal experiences, sharing it had a communal aspect in that they attracted emotional support from the readers in the form of replies to the postings. In addition, because it became a conventional genre of discussing personal experiences of the protests on the Internet, personal accounts of the protest experience were understood as a part of collective narratives of the events for the community as a whole. For this reason, these postings shared similar elements, such as descriptions of what had happened in the protest they had participated in and what the participants had felt, often with statements that encouraged other people to join their experiences.

Because these hughis were based on what one actually experienced in the protest scene, they were oftentimes used as evidence against the reporting of conservative news media. Not surprisingly, the major conservative newspapers in Korea framed the candlelight protests in a negative way, especially in the beginning. They often described these largely peaceful protests as “violent”:

Violence marred the biggest candlelight protests yet against opening the Korean market to U.S. beef over the weekend. Police estimate that over 40,000 people participated, while the organizers put the number at 100,000. (Chosun, 2008, my emphasis)

In response to this, netizens circulated stories about how aggressive police officers—not the protesters—were toward the citizens on the street:

I was standing in the front line and I saw a police water cannon car coming toward us. I saw a disabled lady in a wheelchair and the car came in front of her and it fired water to her. My friend and I were trying to help her but it looked like she was already hurt. (“I went to the vigil” 2008)

Before the Internet, vernacular narratives of a public event were often mediated and structured by media professionals such as journalists. Although not as eloquent as mediated narratives, online narratives of personal experience in the protests challenged these discursive rituals and naturalizing narratives of the dominant discourse and traditional structures of speaking power (Mitra and Watts, 2002). This indicates that a multitude of vernacular voices now have a potential to contest the veracity, authenticity, and decorum of traditionally authoritative discourses.

By adding fragments of stories of their experiences, netizens were collectively involved in articulating and archiving the present that the mainstream media failed to capture comprehensively. In addition, personal narratives of one’s experience with the 1987 movement gave voice to ordinary people’s living memories of the past and helped construct the meaning of the present in relation to the past. These practices of sharing and circulating vernacular experiences not only concerned the past and the present but also assumed a future that would remember the present. On the Internet, there were a lot of discourses about how their protests would be remembered as “history” in the future: “June democracy movement in 1987 and now! … We have changed our history and we can do that again. We should fight for our future generation … because history will remember you!” (I advertised, 2008).

As theologian Moltmann (2000) argues, the past and the future could simultaneously exist in the present. According to him, humans visualize the past by use of memory, the future by expectation, and the present by observation. These creative visualizations can be co-present: “Being-which-is-no-longer (Nicht-mehr-Seiende) and being-which-is-not-yet (Noch-nicht-Seiende) are called into present being in the human spirit through the power of memory and expectation” (Moltmann, 2000: 31). In this sense, through the practice of articulating their experiences in their own terms on the Internet, netizens during the candlelight protests experienced a time in which their past was lively recreated, future was collectively imagined, and the possibility of human action in the present was widely open. More importantly, it was not just experienced, but was actively constructed by collective discursive practices.

Revisiting the unfinished business of the past

During the candlelight protests, through the vernacular (re)constructions of the past memories and present experiences, netizens were able to make a link between the two temporal points, which in turn enabled them to engage in the present and provided a discursive capacity to articulate their emotions, claims, and lived experiences that had often been muffled in the institutional and mainstream media discourse. While the memory of the 1987 movement was important in both mainstream news media and online discourse, netizens were able to use the past to mobilize actions for the present, legitimize the current events, and to reimagine the future community. The mobility, concreteness, corporeality, multiplicity, and expressiveness of vernacular memories—different from the institutional and archival memories of the 1987 movement—provided netizens with an interpretive framework to alternatively construct the identity and meaning of the candlelight protests. The process of vernacular rearticulation of the archival past identified, expanded, concretized, and enriched the meaning of the present.

During the candlelight protests, the past was not just used to reflect the present predicament. It also served as a memory for overcoming the predicament and envisioning the nation’s future. One of the most popular slogans used in the protests was “The Republic of Korea is a democratic republic” and “the sovereignty of the Republic of Korea resides in the people,” which are the first articles of the nation’s constitution. With the slogan, the supporters of the protests declared that the sovereign power of the nation belonged to them, and with that constitutional authority, they ordered the president to obey them.

It is notable that the current constitution based on the ideals of a “democratic republic” was last amended in 1988 as a result of the 1987 movement. Abolishing the previous version of the constitution that permitted an indirect presidential election, the JDM catalyzed the rapid democratization process in the past two decades. However, as many public intellectuals in Korea have argued, the democratic republic ideals of the 1987 movement were never fully realized in the Korean political terrain. There has been no functioning “public sphere,” through which citizens could take part in civic affairs other than elections. Moreover, the ideals of public service and equality crucial to the system of a democratic republic have lost their ground in the nation’s transition to the neoliberal economic model after the AFC. In other words, the nation’s visions established through the 1987 movement were never fulfilled in actuality. In this sense, the use of the first article of the constitution as a movement rhetoric during the candlelight protests can be seen as an attempt to revisit the past movement and to collectively re-envision the nation’s fundamental values for which their compatriots in the past fought with their lives.

The unfinished business of the past haunted the candlelight protests. The heavy weight of the past predetermined the meaning of the present. It should be noted, however, that the use of past memories in the present did not go without resistance or controversy. As Zelizer (1995) notes, collective memories are always plural and thus open to contestations. While vernacular memories of the 1987 movement were often used as a discursive tactic to historicize, legitimize, and reinforce the present action, there were discourses about how the two movements were different or how they should be different. For example, in an Internet posting on Agora, one netizen argued that the candlelight protests should be interpreted with a different frame from the previous movements:

The reason why I am arguing against the slogan of democracy is that what we are asking for is NOT just democracy … People who see the candlelight protests in line with the 1987 movement demand that we should fight for the values of democracy. However, I argue that the candlelight protests are completely different from any other past movements. (“More than democracy,” 2008)

However, arguments like this often invited criticisms that they would inhibit the mobilization for the candlelight protests: “Please put this down if you support for the candlelight protests” (“More than democracy,” 2008). For the collective action to continue, the two movements should maintain some connections even though they are more different than similar in many aspects.

This suggests possible limitations of the appropriation of collective memory in the interpretation of the present. In fact, the 1987 movement took place in the historical context in which fundamental principles of democracy were violated in the name of social order. The cost of participation in the street demonstrations was so high that people could have lost their lives. What they demanded was the abolition of dictatorship and the endorsement of popular sovereignty through direct presidential elections. On the contrary, the contexts of the candlelight protests were more complex, nuanced, and subtle than those of the past. The protests were intertwined with geopolitical issues like economic globalization and the expansion of the neoliberal market system accompanied by increasing free-trade agreements between countries. Moreover, the neoliberal economic logic was a governing force in the country especially after the AFC. It was in this social milieu that presidential candidate Lee Myung-bak, who promised a rapid recovery of the domestic economy, won a landslide victory in the 2008 election, despite his controversial stock manipulation scandal. As a former CEO of a major construction company, he explicitly presented himself as the nation’s CEO and his very first corporate decision was to resume the imports of US beef. That is, the very same people, with their sovereign right, elected Lee as the president who had promised more radical neoliberal economic policies. However, because the candlelight protests were often considered in the shadow of the 1987 movement, the protests failed to provide the public with an opportunity to reflect the complex social reality it inhabited. In a sense, the articulation of the “vernacular” memory of the JDM on the Internet became an “official” ritual at some point because it ended up historicizing the past and its relation to the present, leaving out alternative interpretations that did not fit to a certain narrative frame. Therefore, the line between vernacular and official is thin, often converged, and can be crossed from either direction.

As observed in the case of the candlelight protests in Korea, the articulation of vernacular memories can provide an alternative vision to define, interpret, and shape the present moment. It also creates a model for public engagement with the present in relation to the past and provides a rhetorical capacity to collectively envision the meaning of the present in relation to the future. At the same time, however, they can limit the meaning and boundary of the present that can be different in many respects from the past. In the case of the candlelight protests, because of the haunting shadow of the past movement, the potential of a new citizen movement, new democracy embodied in the candlelight protests was neither fully imagined nor realized. In a sense, memories of the past and the present were collectively filtered, rearranged, and distorted to construct the shared identity, vision, and political affiliation during the candlelight protests. Despite the concreteness and multiplicity of vernacular memories, the model and the norm that they provide can thus be sometimes too familiar. As an interpretive frame that often pushes commonality over particularity, memories can be blind to the subtlety, complexity, and the novelty of the present.