Media use, social capital, and civic participation in South Korea

Journalism and Mass Communication Quarterly

Volumn 84, Issue 3, 2007, Pages 477-494

  Kim, Sei Hill ^a  

^a AUBURN UNIVERSITY   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

INTERNET; LOCAL PARTICIPATION; MEDIA ROLE; SOCIAL CAPITAL;

ASIA; EURASIA; FAR EAST; KOREA; SOUTH KOREA;

EID: 38749154315     PISSN: 10776990     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1177/107769900708400305     Document Type: Article

References (65)

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2. South Korea elected a civilian president in 1992, paving the way for a return to democracy after three decades of military dictatorship.
3. Robert D. Putnam, "The Strange Disappearance of Civic America," The American Prospect 24 (winter 1996): 34-48, 34.
4. John Brehm and Wendy Rahn, "Individual-Level Evidence for the Causes and Consequences of Social Capital," American Journal of Political Science 41 (July 1997): 999-1023.
5. E.g., Dhavan V. Shah, "Civic Engagement, Interpersonal Trust, and Television Use: An Individual Level Assessment of Social Capital," Political Psychology 19 (September 1998): 469-96.
6. Nojin Kwak, Dhavan V. Shah, and R. Lance Holbert, "Connecting, Trusting, and Participating: The Direct and Interactive Effects of Social Associations," Political Research Quarterly 57 (December 2004): 643-52;
7. Putnam, "The Strange Disappearance of Civic America."
8. Francis Fukuyama, Trust: The Social Virtues and the Creation of Prosperity (New York: Free Press, 1995), 26.
9. Kwak, Shah, and Holbert, "Connecting, Trusting, and Participating·:
10. Ronald La Due Lake and Robert Huckgeldt, "Social Capital, Social Network, and Political Participation," Political Psychology 19 (September 1998): 567-84.
11. Dhavan V Shah, Michael Schmierbach, Joshua Hawkins, Rodelfo Espino, and Janet Donovan, "Nonrecursive Models of Internet Use and Community Engagement: Questioning Whether Time Spent Online Erodes Social Capital," Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly 79 (winter 2002): 964-87.
12. Robert D. Putnam, "Bowling Alone: America's Declining Social Capital," Journal of Democracy 6 (January 1995): 65-78.
13. Kwak, Shah, and Holbert, "Connecting, Trusting, and Participating."
14. Putnam, "Bowling Alone"; Putnam, "The Strange Disappearance of Civic America."
15. George Gerbner, Larry Gross, Michael Morgan, and Nancy Signorielli, "The Mainstreaming of America: Violence Profile No. 11," Journal of Communication 30 (September 1980): 10-29.
16. Putnam, "Bowling Alone";
17. Putnam, "The Strange Disappearance of Civic America."
18. Dhavan V. Shah, Jack M. McLeod, and So-Hyang Yoon, "Communication, Context, and Community: An Exploration of Print, Broadcast, and Internet Influences," Communication Research 28 (August 2001): 464-506.
19. Pippa Norris, "Does Television Erode Social Capital? A Reply to Putnam," PS: Political Science & Politics 29 (September 1996): 474-80.
20. Patricia Moy, Dietram A. Scbeufele, and R. Lance Holbert, "Television Use and Social Capital: Testing Putnam's Time Displacement Hypothesis," Mass Communication & Society 2 (winter/ spring 1999): 27-45.
21. Shah, McLeod, and Yoon, "Communication, Context, and Community."
22. Alan M. Rubin, "Ritualized and Instrumental Television Viewing," Journal of Communication 34 (summer 1984): 67-77.
23. William P. Eveland, Jr., "News Information Processing as Mediator of the Relationship between Motivations and Political Knowledge," Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly 79 (spring 2002): 26-40;
24. Shah, McLeod, and Yoon, "Communication, Context, and Community."
25. Robert P, Hawkins and Suzanne Pingree, "Uniform Messages and Habitual Viewing: Unnecessary Assumption in Social Reality Effects," Human Communication Research 7 (summer 1981): 291-301.
26. Sei-Hill Kim, Dietram A. Scheufele, and James Shanahan, "Who Cares about the Issues? Issue Voting and the Role of News Media during the 2000 U. S. Presidential Election," Journal of Communication 55 (March 2005): 103-21.
27. Jeffrey P. Jones, Entertaining Politics: New Political Television and Civic Culture (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2005);
28. Shah, McLeod, and Yoon, "Communication, Context, and Community."
29. Shah, "Civic Engagement, Interpersonal Trust, and Television Use."
30. Patricia Moy and Dietran A. Scheufele, "Media Effects on Political and Social Trust," Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly 77 (winter 2000): 744-59.
31. Joseph N. Cappella, GangHeong Lee, and Brian Southwell, "The Effects of News and Entertainment on Interpersonal Trust: Political Talk Radio, Newspapers, and Television" (paper presented at the annual conference of the International Communication Association, 1997).
32. E.g., Jack M. McLeod, Dietram A. Scheufele, and Patricia Moy, "Community, Communication, and Participation: The Role of Mass Media and Interpersonal Discussion in Local Political Participation," Political Communication 16 (July 1999): 315-36;
33. Keith R. Stamm, Arthur G. Emig, and Michael B. Hesse, "The Contribution of Local Media to Community Involvement," Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly 74 (spring 1997): 97-107;
34. Eric W. Rothenbuhler, Lawrence J. Mullen, Richard DeLaurell, and Choon Ryul Ryu, "Communication, Community Attachment, and Involvement," Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly 73 (summer 1996): 445-66.
35. Gerbner et al., "The Mainstrearning of America."
36. Yong-Seok Whang, "An Explorative Study of the Internet Use and Political Participation: The Use of Political Sites during the 2000 Congressional Election," Korean Journal of Journalism Study 45 (summer 2001): 421-56.
37. Hyung-Joon Kim, "An Evaluation of the Media and Internet Election Campaigns" (paper presented to the Election Conference of the Korean Political Science Association, 2003).
38. Sei-Hill Kim and Miejeong Han, "Media Use and Participatory Democracy in South Korea: News Media vs. Entertainment Media," Mass Communication & Society 8 (2005):133-53.
39. Data were retrieved from a statistical database made available for public use by Korean Statistical Information System (http://kosis.nso.go.kr). According to these numbers, newspaper readership is much higher in South Korea than it is in the United States. In 2004, only about 42% of Americans (18 or older) answered they had read a newspaper "yesterday" (The Pew Research Center, News Audiences Increasingly Politicized, retrieved February 27, 2007, at http://people-press.org/reports/ display.php3?PageID=833).
40. 2002 Estimates (Korea Press Foundation, Readers Are Leaders, retrieved November 11, 2005, at www.presskorea.or.kr/data/ statistics01.asp).
41. This is a 2004 estimate reported by Korean Statistical Information System (http://kosis.nso.go.kr). Television news viewership is also higher in South Korea than in the United States. According to a recent survey (The Pew Research Center, News Audiences), about 60% of Americans (18 or older) watched television news "yesterday."
42. Korea Press Foundation, Readers Are Leaders.
43. Korea Press Foundation, Readers Are Leaders.
44. Korea Press Foundation, Readers Are Leaders.
45. John Borland and Michael Kanellos, "South Korea Leads the Way," News.com, July 28, 2004, retrieved December 8, 2005, at http://news.com.com/South+Korea+leads+the+way/ 2009-1034_3-5261393.html?tag=nl.
46. OECD, OECD Broadband Statistics to June 2006, retrieved February 28 2007 at http://www.oecd.org/document/9/ 0,2340,en_2649_34223_37529673_1_1_1_1,00.html.
47. M. Kim, Hangul, the Leading Brand in Korea (Seoul, Korea: Jawoo, 2006).
48. Kim and Han, "Media Use and Participatory Democracy."
49. B. Ku, What the Rho Mu Hyun Regime Means, retrieved April 4, 2003, at http://emerge.joins.com/200302/20030202.asp.
50. Putnam, "Bowling Alone";
51. Putnam, "The Strange Disappearance of Civic America."
52. Calculation of the cooperation rate followed the standard definitions put forth by the American Association for Public Opinion Research, Standard Definitions: Final Dispositions of Case Codes and Outcome Rates for Surveys, 3d ed. (Lenexa, KS: AAPOR, 2004).
53. Respondents who did not use each medium at all (television, newspaper, the Internet) were coded '0' on related news and entertainment measures.
54. Cyworld (www.cyworld.co.kr) is a Korean version of Myspace.com, which offers its users a personal Web space to post profiles of themselves, to create networking opportunities, and to exchange personal materials and information within the network.
55. Despite the relatively low cooperation rate (41.2%), the sample corresponded quite closely to the population on key demographic indicators. According to the 2005 Census (http://kosis.nso.go.kr), female citizens accounted for about 51% of the population in Seoul. About 49% of the city's residents 20 or older completed some college or more. The average household monthly income in 2005 was about 3.2 million Korean Won. As of October 2006, one U.S. dollar equaled about 970 Korean Won.
56. When people read a newspaper, they tend to read both news and entertainment articles at the same time. The negative effect of entertainment content, therefore, can be canceled out or reduced by the positive effect of reading articles about public affairs. The negative effect of newspaper entertainment might be somewhat suppressed in partial models (Models 1 and 3) when the variable entered regression without controlling for hard news reading.
57. Gerbner et al., "The Mainstreaming of America."
58. Most of the crime and violence in the United States is reported on local news. Statistics shows that about 59% of Americans watched local news in 2004, whereas only 38% and 34% watched cable and nightly network news (The Pew Research Center, News Audiences). On the contrary, most viewers in South Korea watch national network newscasts. South Korea is such a small country (about the size of Indiana) that local media markets are not large enough, except for a handful of large cities, to produce their own news or other programs. South Koreans, therefore, may be exposed to crime news less often than Americans, given that national news is less likely than local to report crime and violence. More important, the crime rate itself is significantly lower in South Korea. That is, there is less crime in the country for news media to report. According to the United Nations, there were about 147 robbery cases per 100,000 Americans in 1999, whereas only about 10 cases were reported in South Korea (see United Nations Office of Drugs and Crime, The Seventh United Nations Survey on Crime Trends and the Operations of Criminal Justice Systems (1998 - 2000), retrieved February 27, 2007, at http://www.unodc.org/unodc/crime_cicp_survey_seventh.html).
59. Putnam, "The Strange Disappearance of Civic America," 47.
60. This inhibiting consequence is particularly observable in South Korea due to the large popularity of sports and entertainment papers in its newspaper market. These entertainment-style newspapers - so called "sports papers" - devote entire sections to sports and entertainment news. According to a readership survey in 2003 (www.hankookresearch.co.kr), at least four sports papers were ranked in the top ten daily newspapers in South Korea.
61. Kwak, Shah, and Holbert, "Connecting, Trusting, and Participating."
62. Shah et al., "Nonrecursive Models of Internet Use and Community Engagement."
63. W. Russell Neuman, The Paradox of Mass Politics: Knowledge and Opinion in the American Electorate (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1986).
64. E.g., Richard Davis, The Web of Politics. The Internet's Impact in the American Political System (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999);
65. Norman Nie and Lutz Erbring, Internet and Society: A Preliminary Report, retrieved December 8, 2005, at http://www.stanford.edu/group/ siqss/Press_Release/internetStudy.html.