Trends in online networking among South Korean politicians - A mixed-method approach

Abstract In recent years, as information technologies have grown in sophistication and become more fully integrated into daily lifestyles, a general expectation has arisen that the internet has the potential to reconfigure social and political relationships, and to create new political configurations. Blogging, in particular, has been seen to have significant potential to merge the public and the personal in new ways, potentially altering the nature of politics, particularly in nations where political processes are formalistic and highly regulated. As an example, politicians who blog have developed a new approach to communicating with their constituencies, in that the private thoughts of the political actor are expressed in a relatively unmediated environment. This study, which examines trends in blog linkages among Assembly members in Korea, provides a longitudinal analysis of blog linkages in order to assess the long term implications of new media technologies in Korean society and politics. The data were gathered from the blogs of Korea's National Assembly members for 2005 and 2006. An analysis of these links indicates that, indeed, there is an increased use of blogs among National Assembly members. However, it seems that over time, the network becomes sparser, less integrated, and more decentralized. This study also suggests that offline imperatives for political organization figure prominently in the motives of establishing online linkages to other political blogs.

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