It turns out the whole saga of dog-sh**t-girl in South Korea was just the tip of the, um, iceberg and the South Korean media have been working themselves up into quite a state about 'cyberterror' - where netizens gang up to bombard a website they don't like or to express an opinion. The South Korean government is as a result looking into whether to insist that people give their real names online (apparently some sites already ask users to input their citizenship numbers).
It's quite amusing how the dog-sh**t-girl saga made its way around the net and round the world, into the Washington Post and then back onto the Korean language internet again and now it's been taken up in the Nikkei Express (electronic newsletter from Nikkei Business, Japan's leading business magazine) by a professor from a Korean women's university. She explains the whole story, and other cyberterror incidents but takes a different tack from the government, saying that most Koreans are quite happy to post on blogs revealing their real names, but now some are saying that this leads to too much invasion of privacy, and apparently have started a 'Victims of Portal Sites' group.
I sense a clash between traditional, authoritarian segments of Korean society, who believe people should be made to clear up their dog's mess and that the government should take the lead in enforcing socially acceptable behaviour, no matter what the threat to privacy, and the blogging generation, who are still trying to understand the implications of being one of the most 'wired' societies in the world.
Anthroplogists are helping companies such as Intel, Microsoft and Xerox to question their culturally specific approaches to various markets, according to an article in the Financial Times recently (subscription only).
For example , Chinese parents do not see computers as having the desired educational benefit of helping their children to learn Mandarin, and instead see PCs as a distraction because of uncontrollable access to the internet. This contrasts with American parents who think that buying a computer for your child early on is helpful to their education.
As a result of this research Intel launched a PC aimed at the Chinese home education market which has a touch sensitive screen that allows users to write in Mandarin, and even checks the stroke order that the character is being written in. Also, thanks to the anthropologist's analysis, Intel included a physical locking mechanism on the PC, visible from elsewhere in the room, as locks and keys have symbolism in China as manifestations of authority. The physical locking mechanism has more meaning than a software-based key.