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In Korea, as elsewhere, the Internet is as much about sex as entertainment. In a society still deeply influenced by conservative Confucian values, the anonymity and freedom of cyberspace has provided an escape from old-style mores that many find oppressive, especially the young. So not surprisingly, online dating is hugely popular, particularly among high-school and university students. Skylove.com, a chat room, makes it easy. When a user logs on, he chooses an icon to identify himself. Other people's icons are available for viewing. Then he can cull candidates with the required interests or qualifications, such as a university degree. Usually, a guy clicks on a girl's icon and asks if she wants to chat. If the answer is yes, the couple pops into a private chat room and the dating dance begins. If all goes well, they'll agree to meet off-line, often that evening. This isn't necessarily about finding your soul mate or life partner. Skylove and similar chat clubs have made casual encounters between the sexes much easier in a society where Western-style dating itself is a relatively new concept.
Sometimes love does bloom. Just ask Choi Moon Sun, 27, and Kim Kwang Chul, 26. Choi was in a PC room, trying to stay awake while waiting to catch the first morning bus back to her home in the suburbs. Kim accidentally clicked on her icon and kept pestering her for a chat. Reluctantly, she agreed to talk. The rest was history. Says Choi: "If my [future] husband hadn't been so persistent, I wouldn't have accepted his call. I was afraid I might run into a weirdo."
But Koreans are discovering, like the rest of the world, that the Internet has a dark side. Many women have met weirdos online. Teenage girls are offering themselves for sex at chat sites, and police have set up a special squad to patrol Korean cyberspace. In a society where smut isn't readily available, easy access to the Internet is exposing more kids to pornography, says Kim Yong Hak, a sociology professor at Yonsei University. In a survey of 10 schools in Seoul, he found 10% of 11-year-olds had visited porn sites. With PCs in kids' bedrooms and PC rooms on every street corner, it isn't easy to turn back the tide. Says Kim: "With one key stroke, a child can switch from an educational site to a porn site."
Even if they don't look at the raunchy stuff, many kids may be spending too much time online. Song, 16, was bullied at school and turned to the Internet for solace. But soon he found he couldn't turn it off. At times, he would go 24 hours straight without sleeping or eating as he roamed the Web or networked with a growing band of online pals. "It was so much fun being online," says Song, who asks that his full name not be disclosed. But one day, "I realized I was addicted." His treatment began last May after his parents found him virtually living in a PC room. They checked him into the Net Addiction Clinic in Seoul, founded by psychiatrist Kim Hyun Soo. While addiction to the Net is treated much like other dependencies, kids don't have to go cold turkey: the clinic lets them log onto its computers for short periods. But they spend most of their time relearning how to cope with people in the real world. There's one core problem, however: kids who are good at games and other cyberentertainment gain status among their peers, and that pushes them deeper into a computer-centered life. "In extreme cases," says psychiatrist Kim, "these kids believe they are really growing up in cyberspace."
But some Koreans have found that cyberspace can also be a place for healing. In June last year, a fire incinerated a kindergarten holiday camp near Korea's west coast, killing 19 children. The tragedy shocked many Koreans, including Dadaworld's Shin Yoo Jin. Shin is building an elaborate three-dimensional city in cyberspace where you can shop, visit an art gallery or a police station, even do the macarena. He suggested adding a permanent memorial to the dead children in his virtual city.
An architect at heart, Shin created a spacious hall with slabs of virtual stone to house the memorial. Like the rest of Dadaworlds, it is a three-dimensional space—visitors use "avatars" to navigate a broad stairway and enter the hall, where pictures of the dead children hang on the wall. A selection of the children's belongings sits on a shelf below the pictures—a red yoyo, robot toys, a purple baseball cap. Visitors can click on icons to see more pictures and video clips of the victims or ponder over messages left by grieving parents. Reads one: "I still feel like you will call me on my cell phone and ask me to bring home hamburgers." Parents can even ask to see computer-generated avatars of their children. One parent took his avatar son for a walk in the garden outside the memorial.
Some parents were hesitant about the project, but now most visit the site once a day, sometimes more, says Koh Suk, the head of an association of the children's parents. He lost twin girls in the blaze. When the memorial opened last year, Koh still hadn't accepted that his daughters were dead. "Now I believe they are alive and growing in this cyberworld. It has become a source of consolation for me." It isn't clear yet whether visiting dead family members in cyberspace is the wave of the future. Even Shin concedes Dadaworlds may be a little ahead of its time. But then, that's what life's like at the cutting edge of the Internet revolution. Korea's Internet adventure looks set to continue—at breakneck speed. Advice to the rest of the world: grab yourself a magic ring and hold on.