A South Korean version of MySpace is emerging as a potent political force. How Cyworld is reshaping the country’s presidential campaign.
Miri Leung does all the usual teenage things online: she chats, e-mails, decorates her cyber home and buys the latest fashions for her avatar. But lately she’s also venturing into an area that most political candidates still dream about. The 18-year-old is going online to learn about political issues with her country’s real-life presidential hopefuls. “It’s cool,” says Leung. “It kind of makes me feel like [the candidates] are just like all of my other friends.”
Leung lives in South Korea, where candidates are making new efforts to jump on the cyber bandwagon and woo the country’s youngest voters. Their vehicle: a network called Cyworld, South Korea’s equivalent to American online social sensations like MySpace, Facebook and Friendster. Launched in 1999, the site recently catapulted to the No. 1 spot among Asian networking sites, hosting an estimated 20 million users daily and drawing in an estimated $146 million in revenue. (MySpace, by contrast, brought in nearly $200 million in 2006; Facebook a little over $100 million.)
Cyworld, says its creators at SK Communications—South Korea’s top Internet provider—was designed to appeal to Koreans with its two-dimensional bubbly cartoon characters and bold graphics. Users exchange real money for the Cyworld currency of dotori, which translates as “acorns.” With it they can accessorize their own pages or buy gifts for others. The virtual currency has become so popular that it spills over into real life, too. Jung-Eun Lee, a 33-year-old Seoul-based reporter, for example, says her birthday gifts included dotori from her husband and Cyworld gifts from friends.
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