Comments on South Korean Politicians' Profiles on Cyworld

Singapore.
The next speaker in this session at ICA 2010 is Se Jung Park, whose focus is on the use of the Korean social networking site Cyworld by politicians. South Korea is a leading country for Internet access, of course, but sites like Facebook and Twitter are not very popular; YouTube, in fact, is partially censored. So, Cyworld is the main space for social networking - including for politicians.

The present study examined the comments left on the Cyworld 'mini-hompys' of Korean politicians during April 2008 and June 2009; from the total number, some 200 comments from each politician's space were randomly selected, and a semantic sentiment analysis was then conducted. There were obvious spikes in commenting during the recent mass protests against the reintroduction of US beef imports.

Se Jung now presents a map of key terms found here, with many terms pointing to the Korean collectivist tradition, and notes that ruling party members received more negative than positive comments, while opposition party members received largely positive comments. Also, male users tended to be more negative, females more positive. Female users who engaged positively also generally appeared more active, more positive, and more friendly in their overall interactions on Cyworld.

It would be interesting to examine politicians' responses to this as well, and to explore these developments over time. A broader study of commenting on Cyworld would also be interesting.

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