“People’s Star” Jin-Sil Choi has been found dead in her Seoul house, after apparently losing face over rumors circulating on and offline. She was known to specially care about internet comments about her, often spending hours reading thousands of them.

This tragic incident exposes the failure of the recent identity system that the government put in place last year following a rash of suicides among anonymous and famous citizens.

The KCC [Korean Communication Commission] admits that the identity verification system has so far had a limited impact on curbing cyber bullying since its introduction in July last year, saying that the number of “malicious” messages reduced by only about 2 percent. 

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Chang Kim - who sold his company to Google while he was on stage at Lift Asia (video coming soon, congrats Chang :) -  tries to come up with a better solution, proposing the creation of social black/white lists.

 If one of the defining characteristics of the Web 2.0 is socialness, why don’t we look at this problem through the lens of “social” as well? I think we should introduce what I call a “social whitelist” and “social blacklist.” (Hey, it’s the term that’s racist, not me.)

From our online relationship, we all interact with other identities, and there are some identities we know can be trusted. These good ID’s have been there for some time, with proven track record, and most of them have their own websites where they put their reputation and content on. Also, if I can trust this ID, I could perhaps also trust other ID’s that are being trusted by this particular ID. Now, if we can somehow aggregate and track these social trusts among online ID’s, we could perhaps have a society-wide online trust system sooner or later.

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My opinion is that technology can only go that far when it comes to solve this problem. There are no (should I say “less”?) suicides over Internet comments in Europe and the US because our culture puts less importance in losing face. Max Mosley or the Star Wars Kid are living proofs that, as the French put it, “ridiculous doesn’t kill”.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, October 8th, 2008 at 1:11 pm and is filed under korea, society, internet, web. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.