A Strong IT Country

Korea needs to develop information age culture to sustain strides

The month of June is the Month of Information and Culture, the 19th since its designation in 1988 to commemorate the explosive development of the information technology industry in the country. Computers were first imported into the country in June of 1967 by the Statistics Bureau of the then Economic Planning Board and the automation of the telephone system was completed in June 1987, making June the month of great turning point in the country's information technology industry.
The information technology industry made a great stride during the past two decades to the extent that the country ranked second in the Digital Opportunity Index in 2005 in the world, second in the supply rate of the Internet and the 5th in the e-government index, to make Korea emerge as an IT powerhouse. The progress is owed to a number of important projects in the industry that were set up to speed up the development of the industry including ?yber Korea 21," "T839 Strategy,"and other strategies.
Following the establishment of the Ministry of Information and Communication in 1996, the progress the industry made has been astounding with the number of Internet subscribers rising to 33 million from 730,000 and the subscribers of mobile telephones jumping to 38 million from 3.18 million, expanding 45 and 12 times respectively.
But there are bright and dark sides behind the rapid development of the industry in the past two decades. The positive side shows that the country has become a top country in the use of the Internet with its people upgrading the information capacity, meaning that social participation of the people through the Internet has expanded. Netizens operate Internet cafes, and mini-home pages, among others, to actively exchange their opinions and in the process, created their own languages with great pleasure.
Mobile phones have raised the level of communication in the country to new heights, and in the process, a popular export item, making a great contribution to the economic growth.
However, the excessive use of the Internet and mobile phones have become a serious concern in the country. The Internet has become a medium to spread wild rumors and anti-social opinions, in addition to being an outlet for private information, game addictions and illegal gambling. The rapid informatization created disparities among regions and information gap among different brackets in society.
Such shortcomings are the matters created in the process of the information age that cannot be overlooked. The information culture can be divided into equipment, action and models. In the area of equipment culture, the government has upgraded the information application capacity of the people through the construction of IT and information age education.
As such, the online community and participation culture, along with others, the positive action culture took hold. But the country has a long way to go in establishing trust on the online, consideration for others and consciousness for responsibility to build a model culture.
From 1988 to 2000, the equipment culture and action culture took hold in the information period, but later on, the government took steps to establish model culture, and its expansion.
In order for Korea to become a first-rate IT country, it has to create a high-level information culture and develop it. In the process of making the country a strong IT country, it has to pay a great attention to trust as a key factor in social development in the 21st century as Francis Fukuyama noted.
It would be very difficult for Korea to maintain sustainable development, unless it has created an information culture, although it has the top-level IT infrastructure. nw

MIC Minister Rho Jun-hyong delivers a speech at the ceremony marking the Month of Information June 1.

Minister Rho shakes hands with one of the winners of awards at the ceremony.