individual blog in South Korea

Nowadays, it seems that one out of two among the university students of South Korea has an individual homepage called Cyworld mini-homepage or 'Blog'. The distinguish features from the previous one are that users can connect with each other and go to other homepages without any boundaries. From the Cyworld mini-homepage, we can display my homepage with cute and pretty stuffs so that we can show our own identities and distinction to others. The spreading of the digital camera and the desire to show oneself and to know the others’ lives bring this boom to the young. Although we enjoy it without any hesitation, there are some privacy problems.

The Cyworld mini-homepage has a system to protect the invasion of the privacy. We can divide the guests into neighborhood (1 Chon) and the others. We can show the pictures and the writings to all the other people, only neighborhood or none of them. However, there is a system that other people can take the pictures freely from other homepage although some prohibition systems exist, so it is useless to divide people into different levels in some way.

I think we have the indiscretion to use the Internet to spread other people’s privacy lives something like that. In the near future, it would be possible that our privacy is under the supervision by the Internet or other technology systems as George Orwell warned in <1984>. As he mentioned in his book `Big Brother’, it is a system that put people under surveillance. However, from other points of view, the government can watch over the people and the people avoid dangerous situations under the control of the supervisor. Therefore, it is necessary to think about whether we are safe from that kind of the surveillance and the observer by Cyworld or any other stuffs on the Internet.