Abstract
Social Media and South Korean National Security seeks to answer the question of how social media affects the Republic of Korea’s (ROK) national security. It includes discussions on security issues as diverse as North Korean nuclear/missile tests and limited provocations, and contributes to the understanding of media’s role in framing these issues. Specifically, Kim’s discussions of military secrecy in Chapters 2 and 3 call our attention to the need to create social norms and institutions by which to overcome the clash of civil liberties and national security. Moreover, observers of media would find this book worth a read, because it unfolds how ROK government interacts with editors and reports of traditional media and how media cover news (pp. 78–90). Even with these contributions in mind, the author might have articulated his argument more clearly and convincingly had he taken into account clear definitions of social media and national security. Additionally, the author’s poor structure and methodology, including organizing chapters more systematically to strengthen the argument, selecting stronger cases, integrating data with the argument effectively and so forth detracted from the overall quality of this book.
Before moving onto the main argument of the book, understanding the definitions of important concepts such as social media and national security needs to be established first. From the term ‘social media’, readers might reasonably infer that the book pertains to interactions on internet space. Although this book is centred on the notion of social media, Kim does not provide information about definitions, types and other traits of the communication tool. Moreover, this study could have been much more successful if the author had more clearly distinguished social from traditional media, given the gravity he places on the latter, as well as the recent trend of the latter expanding into the former. As for the concept of national security, Kim equates it with domestic cohesion (p. 4). In the author’s view (not explicitly stated), cohesion seems to be a state in which ideological cleavages are non-existent. The ambiguity in these definitions diminish an otherwise fascinating study, which is otherwise very much worthy of readers’ time and effort.
Kim is primarily interested in the effect of social media on national security. To understand how these notions are related each other, we need to confirm whether social media and national security are variables and how the author uses them to hypothesize. As to the first task, the data are not always consistent. In the example of the data from Korea Press Foundation on the increase in the user population of social media and the frequency of the usage (pp. 104–105), Kim does not provide indicators of national security and their variations. In fact, this problem partially emanates from the multivariate design of his research. As explained, this book seems to take the changes in ideological cleavages, or ‘consciousness’ (p. 6), and policymaking as indicators of national security. The author operationalizes the cleavages by covering traditional, not social, media (in most cases). On this point, one could easily ask whether the perceptual element (i.e., ideology) in the media would directly lead to behaviours of the public in reality. In addition to this, a more serious problem rests on the fact that the public might influence decision-making processes but are not the decision-makers themselves. The author, somewhat surprisingly, does not define or operationalize policy or policymaking, which promotes national security.
Regarding the casual mechanism of the factors (since their variations are not clear), Kim implies that the increasing clout of social media adversely impacts on national security, widening the ideological cleavages mentioned earlier. With reference to this, characterizing the political orientation (i.e., ideology) of social media is crucial. Considering importance of this issue to his thesis, Kim should have provided a little more attention to this matter. It seems as if the author has realized social media is a neutral vehicle of ideology, leading him to concentrate instead on the users of social media, whom he characterizes as the misinformed, politically liberal, image-driven and irrationally inflexible young generation (pp. 4, 5, 9, 97, 101–102). This claim might not have seemed as biased as it did, if the author had proffered evidence. Such concrete evidence might include the demographic compositions of the users, conservatives’ inactivity vis-à-vis social media, and the denial of credible information of the young. In terms of this absence of evidence, the author, to a large extend, hinges on theoretical discussions from studies not specifically related to the case of South Korea.
Another significant confusion in the book is the author’s discussion about civil liberty; specifically, privacy and/or the right to know (Chapter 1). Putting aside the author’s puzzling discussion about compatibility between national security and civil liberty (pp. 20–21), his main concern resides on the point where the two clash (p. 22). To elaborate, the author deems that growing sensitivity among South Koreans to civil liberty harms national security. Therefore, political tolerance on governmental intrusions of civil liberties is essential for national security. The author then casts another hypothesis: that civil liberties are a function of threat perception and democratic awareness of the liberties of the people (pp. 21–22). The discussion is stifled, as the author seems to provide a different hypothesis. Kim needed to control such variables as the threat perception caused by North Korean provocations or the degree of the awareness of civil liberties to isolate the impact of social media and thereby to prove his original hypothesis. Yet, the book does not suggest possible indicators of threat perception and awareness nor show an attempt to control these variables.
In fact, it seems that inviting intervening variables in the causal mechanism, between the social media and national security, is conducive to increasing explanatory power of the analysis. By paying more attention to actors involved in the decision-making process of the security issues and institutional procedure of relevant policies, the author can substantiate the desired academic contribution, namely, explaining ‘relationship between social media and policymaking elites’ (p. 17). It seems that Chapters 2 and 3 of the National Assembly and the Court pertain to such discussion. Nevertheless, the author could have explored the intervening variables more systematically within the theoretical framework of this book. Hence, such questions would include: how social media affect discussions in the ROK government and the National Assembly; how the Court reacts to dynamics of social media. The causal links between these intervening variables and national security, no matter what the indicators of the latter, must be explained. Besides, the author might have scrutinized the online–offline nexus, considering that social media find a use for offline mobilization, which would likely have more direct impact on policymakers than online activities.
Finally, the case studies in Chapters 4 and 6 do not squarely touch on the impact of social media on national security. This creates a number of problems the author might have addressed. Readers of this book might consider the following issues. First, the case studies primarily revolve around traditional media. Also, the frames of the media may not manifest the ideological cleavages of the South Korean public, whose opinions are regarded as much more important, given the electoral concerns of presidents. Second, some useful information about social media in the case of inter-Korean relations (pp. 162–183) was not fully integrated into the theoretical mechanism of this book. Third, the author does not delve into specific security policies of government (and their changes) in each case. Once clarifying the policies, the author would have been able to narrow the research scope for more focused analysis. Fourth, readers might try to locate the reasoning behind the case-selection. Whether the cases are chosen to control possible alternative explanations, or simply because they are most likely cases that have methodological significance in the matter of explanatory power of the case studies. In fact, the two cases of anti-Americanism, the import of US beef in 2008 and ROK–US Free Trade Agreement, do not seem to be national security issues.
Social Media and South Korean National Security aims for a complex and nuanced analysis of social media and national security, but a series of issues cut it short from being a truly innovative study. This is very regrettable, as it could have opened up further study. Nevertheless, these issues do not completely hamper this study from being a steppingstone for those who have been seeking to fathom the government’s use of social media for political purpose and its impact on national security issues. These topics are currently under heated debates, particularly in South Korea where the recent cases of Lee Myung-bak and Park Geun-hye Administrations’ attempted manipulation of public opinion by ordering National Intelligence Agency and Cyber Command of ROK military to engage in social media. In this respect, this book still provokes and suggests directions other scholars and readers might take. For that, this study is worth paying attention to.