Exploring a Korean Stock Market App through the Walkthrough Method

The second session this morning at IAMCR 2023 is on cyberactivism, and starts with Dongwook Song. His interest is in the financialisation of daily life through stock market apps. He notes that Korean young adults were in a stressed social situation before the pandemic, and after COVID-19 there was a boom in investments, cryptocurrency and stock market speculation, and other financial activities in order to get ahead – everyday life has been financialised.

Dongwook investigated these developments by focussing on the Stockplus investment app, operated by the cryptocurrency exchange Upbit which is itself owned by a social messaging platform. He used the app walkthrough method to explore how young people in Korea engage with this app, and how the app shapes these users as investor subjects.

The Stockplus smartphone app provides easy access to stocks of interest, a user community, stock market trends, a stock item discovery function, and other screens, which Dongwook now walks us through. The community function, in particular, enables engagement as well as competition between users, also ranking them by their weekly stock market gains – in essence further gamifying stock market investments. By participating regular, users can also advance to higher ranking levels.

Overall, this both gamifies and individualises the stock investment experience. There are also some key challenges for the researcher: to investigate this app, is it necessary to become a stock market investor oneself? Is it possible to develop critical uses of this app, or is the stock market logic just overwhelming?