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Even if they don't look at the raunchy stuff, many kids may be spending too much time online. Song, 16, a 10th-grade high school student in Seoul, was bullied at school and took 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 online pals. "It was so much fun," says Song, who asks that his full name not be disclosed. But one day, "I realized I was addicted." Last May his parents checked him into the Net Addiction Clinic in Seoul, founded last year 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 on to 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: 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 Kim, "these kids believe they are really growing up in cyberspace."
But some South Koreans have found that cyberspace can be a place for healing. In June last year, a fire incinerated a kindergarten holiday camp near the west coast, killing 19 children. The tragedy shocked many South Koreans, including entrepreneur Shin Yoo Jin. Shin is building an elaborate three-dimensional cybercity called Dadaworld, where you can shop, visit an art gallery or a police station, even do the macarena. He decided to add a virtual memorial to the dead children.
Shin created a spacious hall with slabs of virtual stone to house the memorial. Like the rest of Dadaworld, it is a three-dimensional space: visitors use "avatars"--cyberfigures incarnating individual people or characters--to navigate a broad stairway and enter the hall, where pictures of the deceased children hang on the wall. Visitors can click on icons to see more pictures and video clips of the victims or ponder messages left by grieving parents. Parents can even ask to see computer-generated avatars of their children. One father took his avatar son for a walk in the virtual garden outside the memorial.
Some parents were hesitant about the project, but most visit the site once a day, sometimes more, says Koh Suk, head of an association of the bereaved, who 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."
Even Shin concedes that Dadaworld may be a little ahead of its time. But other pioneers are sure to push the envelope still further. After all, South Korea is a country that does nothing by half measures. Competitive and hyperkinetic, Koreans are deploying a typical energy and creativity to the Web that meshes nicely with the ethos of the Internet. Though Web mania seems a little over the top at times--does the world need $300 identity rings?--the ideas churning out of South Korea's Internet "lab" could one day make the rest of the world cough up real money for the privilege of joining in its cybertech games.
--With reporting by Stella Kim/Seoul