Urban Time and Religious Time in Seoul

The city is a tangle of temporalities; a privileged time-space where the physics of relativity and lived everyday reality meet.  It is not a mistake that Einstein chose a resolutely "modern" example like the "train thought experiment" to illustrate a relativist understanding of space-time.  Yet it's not that the city is qualitatively different than either earlier, "pre-modern" or non-urban spaces, it's that the city is sine qua non a space where different temporalities are produced.  Indeed, that may be the primary draw of the city, and the reason for its growing popularity--to the point where we are an urban species, so inured to the city's ecologies that we cannot help but think about the "rural" as a series of negative values (cf. Raymond Williams, "The Country and the City").  And in South Korea, a supremely urbanized nation (even in our urbanized world), it is no accident that travel to small towns and provincial cities during the holiday seasons is often likened to travelling back in time.  That said, though, it would be a mistake to miss the essential heterogeneity of urban time.

In other words, the urban gives us what me might regard as contemporary time, but also eddies of relativistic time.  This is at the core of LeFebvre's Rhythmanalysis, where "linear" time collides with "cyclical" time.  

The relations of the cyclical and the linear--interactions, interferences, the domination of one over the other, or the rebellion of one against the other--are not simple: there is between them an antagonistic unity.  They penetrate each other, but in an interminable struggle: sometimes compromise, sometimes disruption.  However, there is between them an indissoluble unity: the repetitive tick of the clock measures the cycle of hours and days.  In industrial practice, where the linear repetitive tends to predominate, the struggle is intense. (85) 

LeFebvre's focus on the chrono-struggle of the city is an important insight.  In the ruinous, "creative destruction" of the capitalist city, corporations wring value from the urban by manipulating temporalities.  One need only consider the recent investigative journalism from the New York Times on abuses at Amazon: the corporation exploits temporalities to a dizzying degree--to the lasting detriment of their employees.  But this "struggle" can take many forms; power (and exploitation) take on a different calculus in different examples.  This, of course, is another benefit to the city: it is both incubator and laboratory for temporal disjuncture, with, for example, different development strategies being examples of not only spatial experiments, but (and oftentimes disastrously), temporal experiments.  

Let's take these two photos taken along Seoul's principle North-South axial boulevard, Sejong-no.    

The first shows adherent of Falun Gong (法輪功) meditating on a corner of Sejong-no and the Cheonggye-cheon (청계천).  They're there, of course, to both publicize the plight of Falun Going in the PRC, as well as gain new adherents. Given the importance of meditation to Falun Gong, it's not particularly surprising that they would choose this method to spread their message.  However: the power of the practice lies (at least in part) in the juxtaposition of temporal rhythms: the rhythms of meditation against the linear rhythms of traffic and commuting.

The second photo shows Sejong-no from almost the same spot.  I'm standing just a few meters north of where the Falun Gong supporters were meditating.  It's Seoul's annual Lotus Lantern Festival (연등축제): thousands of people converging on the center of Seoul for a festival, huge parade, and various speeches from Korea's 조계 (Jogye) order of Buddhism.  This year, the festival occurred close to Buddha's Birthday (a cyclic event) during the year 2559 of the Buddhist calendar.

Of course, both of these involve religious ritual practice, and therefore carve out distinct temporalities from the urban flow around them.  But the similarities soon end.  Falun Gong adherents occupy a small corner of Sejong-no, sharing space with tourists, evangelical Christians, right-wing nationalists and others.  Moreover, they hold an extremely marginal position in South Korea society, with the government reportedly under pressure from China not to accept Falun Gong refugees.  The Lotus Lantern Festival, on the other hand, is a powerful spectacle of religion and nation: the entire street is closed down and festival attendees' attentions are focused on the main stage stage set directly in front of the Gwanghwamun (광화문), with the festivities broadcast on a couple of huge digital screens for those of us without front-row seats. During the short time of the festival (and culminating here on Sejong-no), the different temporalities of Buddhism and nation coincide along a spatial axis that connects Gwanghwamun with the rest of Korea and with the world.  Indeed, the speeches themselves tied Buddhism and the Jogye order directly to the health of the Korean state--a nod to the importance Buddhism has held in the formation of Korea (despite its political and geographic marginalization during the Joseon Dynasty).

So: while temporality, power and religion are closely linked in any ritual, I would also suggest that, in the city, power inheres in the (temporary) alignment of different temporalities.  Perhaps this is one reason for the marginalization of Falun Gong.  With adherents quietly meditating on the corner, the practice stays bottled up in what onlookers might regard as an insouciant temporality.  But were it able to line up with other times?  What then?    

Avengers in Seoul

Children's day (어린이날) is upon us, so the family was off to the neighborhood CGV at 군자역 to see "Avengers: The Age of Ultron."  I'm not a fan, but I consoled myself with the thought that the movie would somehow work into my research on Seoul and science fiction.  And, indeed, it's certainly gratifying to see Avengers battling it out in front of "Kimbap Heaven."  However: without the still, I would have missed it.  For all of the money spent (and for all of the incentives the city of Seoul dished out), there's barely five minutes of Seoul in this film, and that--beside a couple of signs in Korean and an 옥상 텃밭--is of a generic "any city," bits and pieces of Seoul strung together into a non-place.

And I was not the only one disappointed.  As Gang Yu-jeong argued in 경향신문:

A masterpiece of atmospheric kitsch, the back alleys where the action takes place in the Avengers don't really look that different from the back alleys of Hong Kong or Beijing.  When the Avengers talk to Su-hyun (who plays Helen Cho in the film) about the situation, it's not different.  Nothing really sticks out.
The way Avengers 2 portrays Seoul isn't that far off from the way we see it.  Like when you run into your family on the street, the Avengers makes a familiar Korea seem strange.  [ . . .] But this is not the Seoul that we had hoped to see.  The Seoul represented in the film is not a place where I'd want to go.  In Avengers, that hoped-for place is nowhere to be found.   (강유정의 영화로 세상읽기]2015년 어벤져스 서울, translation mine)

Well, given the shallow treatment Seoul gets in the film, one would have to expect disappointment.  On the other hand, the Avengers (in its comic form), is not exactly a superhero version of Baudelaire's flaneur.  Sure--there's lots of urban background, but that's all it is: background.

That is to say, it's just a scene to stage the action.  On another level, if we look at the film as the expression of a conquering and colonizing film apparatus, then Seoul can be incorporated into the action as well as any other place.  Here's where the film even engages in some self-referential dialogue with parallels to both U.S. foreign policy and U.S.-supported "free trade" policies.  As Tony Stark intones, "In a world this vulnerable, we need something more powerful than any of us."  There's equal measures of arrogance and lack of imagination in this line of thinking, and we don't need to move too far afield to see the corporation itself as this unifying power.  And what is cultural difference to a global corporation?  Ultimately, the cities of the world are only a proscenium to stage corporate power, and for that, Seoul will do just fine.  

Searching for the Anthropological Alien

An eminently sensible article in today's New York Times from Seth Shostak, the Director of SETI and a tireless advocate for our continuing quest to find intelligent life beyond the Earth.  But not just that: he's also been a leader in the continuing discourse of what each of the terms in the acronym "SETI" should mean: what kind of search?  Where?  And what should constitute "intelligence"?  This time, he's weighing in on a debate over actively courting extraterrestrial neighbors by broadcasting transmissions into space.  What should we say?  And shouldn't we be more careful?  Perhaps extraterrestrial intelligence will be less-than-impressed with the ravages that modernity and capitalism have wrought.  Or perhaps they'll see our various weaknesses, and swoop down to attack!  These arguments, Shostak suggests, have more to tell us about contemporary, Hollywood scripts than about the intentions of aliens, and he counters with another, suitably contemporary, proposal: send the aliens Big Data!

But this Big Data approach to SETI (Big Data SETI?) seems just as implicated in our vision of human futures as any Hollywood evocation of alien invasion.  "Big Data" seem poised to solve all of our problems, and it was just a matter of time before the idea came up in the context of extraterrestrial life.  And this is ok.  Unavoidably, SETI is about communicating with humans--today.  Each SETI proposal, each new Arecibo project, is potentially data about extraterrestrial intelligence, but also data about terrestrial intelligence.  As Kant writes (and as David Clark expertly annotates),

"The highest concept of species may be that of a terrestrial rational being [eines irdischen vernünftigen], but we will not be able to describe its characteristics because we do not know of a nonterrestrial rational being [nicht- irdischen Wesen] which would enable us to refer to its properties and consequently classify that terrestrial being as rational. It seems, therefore, that the problem of giving an account of the character of the human species is quite insoluble [sie schlechterdings unauflöslich], because the problem could only be solved by comparing two species of rational beings on the basis of experience, but experience has not offered us a comparison between two species of rational beings."  

To put it another way--we have already given Kant his aliens, and each SETI experiment is simultaneously an encounter with an extraterrestrial rationality with which to measure ourselves.  As we move from SETI@home to what will undoubtedly be fascinating experiments with Big Data, we uncover more and more of our own assumptions about intelligence and communication, and our own concern about the intentions of the humans and nonhumans around us.  In this case, "we" (keeping in mind this is hardly a universal "we") worry about the messages we're sending, the networks we're forming.  The albatross of Big Data around around our necks continues to compel us (like the Ancient Mariner) to tell the governments and institutions around us everything about ourselves, all of the time.  Do we really want aliens mining our Big Data?  Do we really want the terrestrial, non-human agents around us to mine our Big Data (search engines, social network analysis, etc.)?



      

Korean Science Fiction and the City, Part 2: Webtoons

In Korean SF, the Internet has been important from the 1990s, with a lot of writers serializing their work online before landing themselves book contracts.  But the importance of Internet platforms extends beyond print to a variety of multimedia, and I have also been considering webtoon representations of Seoul.  Here are a couple:

1). 일호선 (이은재).  (Line 1).  The usual zombie-love story, with a mysterious plague turning most of Seoul's residents into flesh-eating zombies.  You know the drill.

2). 레테 (Lethe).  강도하.   Imagining the afterlife as existing as a shadow in Seoul's 서촌 neighborhood.

Korean Science Fiction and the City

One of my projects in Seoul this year has been collecting representations of the city in Korean science fiction.  Even if we exclude (for the moment) cinema, that still leaves a lot of interesting work that represents the city (and, by default, Seoul).  This project has been immeasurably helped by an incredible resource in Seoul: the Science Fiction a (SF & 판타지 도서관).  Here's what I've been working on in chronological order:

1). 문윤성.  완전사회 (1967).  Yun-seong Mun.  The Perfect Society.

2). 강경옥.  노말 시티 (1993-).  Gyeong-ok Gang. Normal City.

3).  윤태호.  야후 (1999).  Tae-ho Yun.  Yahoo.

4). 배명훈.  타워 (2009).  Myeong-hun Bae.  Tower.

5). 김이환.  절망의 구 (2009).  I-hwan Kim.  The Orb of Despair.

6). 김이환.  동네전쟁 (2011).  I-hwan Kim.  Neighborhood War.

I think we can all agree that this is a quirky list, one that is shaped by the interesting history of SF in Korea as well as my own ignorance.  I'll be filling in this timeline as I go along . . .But time is something I don't have much more of--I'm back to my mid-sized, state university in August.  So any suggestions would be helpful!

YouTube Presentation: Social Network Analysis for Qualitative Research

I did this for the American Anthropological Association last month.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9A9VDFYemg8

Anthropology on the Long Tail

Small Big Data?

Of the many hyperbolic predictions in bestselling books devoted to big data, none is more astounding than Mayer-Schönberger’s and Cukier’s claims that big data will eliminate the need for sampling (why sample when you’ve got all the data?). But here’s the thing. We don’t have all of the data. Let’s look at Twitter. First, people who tweet are not a representative sample of the population. Second, like most commercial platforms, Twitter has moved towards more proprietary policies on the data they have mined from us. Most of us can only access up to 1% of relevant tweets for a given query. That can still be a lot of tweets, and that data is, for the moment, free. But is that big data? In other words, we’ve got sampling bias. If you can detect it, though, you can correct for it—Morstatter et al recommend bootstrapping the data in order to correct for the biased sample.

But it may not be so easy with some of the work we do. For example, the authors note that the difficulties that researchers may have with the long tail of tweets—the 99 percent of hashtags that are not trending. Are these biased? And can that bias be corrected? Research so far has been on the popular terms–#Ferguson, #Obamacare. But for the most part, anthropologists study the long tail: the lives and perspectives of people engaged in quotidian action on a relatively small scale. Heck, we are the long tail: even if we engage in public anthropologies, those anthropologies (and their publics) rarely register a blip in the winner-take-all logic of power-law social media.

On the other hand, our fieldwork is rarely about achieving a certain sample size—it’s about collecting a range of experiences and practices and then contextualizing those results. With social media, we should take the same approach. We my not have big data, but we might use the same tools. And they can still be helpful, but not as a substitute for our painstaking, field research.

The following are two, quick examples of utilizing social network analysis for qualitative research drawn from a webinar I did for AAA in November (eventually to be posted on AAA’s YouTube channel). Both examples utilize a free and open source application for Microsoft Excel—NodeXL–which has the advantage of familiarity and also comes built-in queries for multiple SNS APIs: Twitter, YouTube, Flickr, and, with a little work, Facebook and hyperlink analysis. Finally, all of the complexities of graph theory are already built into the application.

In way of introduction: you’ve got nodes, dots representing people, concepts, organizations, etc., and edges, lines that represent some kind of relationship between the nodes. And although there are many ways we might analyze these relationships, for these examples I only use one measure of centrality—the relative importance of a node. Betweenness centrality ranks the importance of a node based on the number of times it’s crossed in the shortest path between all of the nodes in a graph to each other.

Who are my interlocutors?

I’ve been researching the intersection of place and social network platforms in Seoul, and one of my favorite places has been Gwanghwamun Plaza. But it’s a crowded field of social action, with events

Screenshot of NodeXL

overlapping each other every day, a complexity reflected in the tweets containing Gwanghwamun. First, I use the drop-down menu on NodeXL to query the Twitter API.

Choosing the Twitter Search Network, I enter in a search term 광화문 (Gwanghwamun) and set the parameters for my search. It returns 1528 vertices (dots) representing Twitter accounts connected by 1880 edges (lines) representing relationships between users who have  used the term, or users who were replied to or were mentioned in one of the tweets with that term. It’s pretty messy, but NodeXL gives us some options for ordering this chaos. After running metrics for the data, I have it group the nodes together into separate boxes by connected components.

Screenshot of Twitter users. Note that Twitter IDs have been cropped off

Now I’ve got something more manageable: a series of groups that share some thematic similarities. This can give me a sense of the demonstrations, counter-demonstrations, unconnected events and encounters that make up the social practice of this space. Moreover, I can rank the nodes by centrality to find the most important Twitter accounts. So now I have a sense of this field in a way that both is and is not co-extensive with the physical fieldsite, but

without obscuring the role of physical place: it does matter, after all, that the protest is happening here in Gwanghwamun and not in Second Life.

What does my event mean?

Honfest is a highly commercialized neighborhood festival concocted by a neighborhood entrepreneur in order to brand the neighborhood for commodified consumption. As such, it is a flashpoint of contention, a social drama that reveals the divisions around gentrification, race and class in this formerly working-class neighborhood in north Baltimore.

Twitter users grouped into boxes by connected component and ranked by betweenness centrality

We have sent students into the festival every year in order to document these negotiations. But we are not the only ones. Every year, there are hundreds of people posting their media on social networking sites like Instagram and Flickr. These images are important clues to the meaning of this event and analyzing these data can tell us much about the different ways people categorize space and place: photo elicitation and photovoice applied to social media platforms

Going back to the pull down import menu on NodeXL, I download the related tag network on Flickr for Honfest.

This graph shows the relationship between tagged terms, and, like the preceding example, this may prove too messy for analysis. So: we can again run metrics, and remove terms that occur less frequently in these photos.

Now, we have honfest (at the center of the graph) surrounded by a constellation of terms that co-occur with it. Like the preceding example, I can rank these terms by betweenness centrality—and we find predictable terms: hairspray (the film and the hair product), beehive (the hair style), retro etc.

Concluding thoughts

Both of these examples represent ways that we might utilize socially networked data (rather than big data) to open up our ethnographic work to other meanings, interlocutors and social relations. In neither case is the critical need for face-to-face ethnography eliminated. In fact, just the opposite. In the first example, Twitter helps us to identify issues and people that might be salient to fieldwork, while in the second, tags suggest (but only suggest) different discourses swirling around an urban festival. Both are only first steps in different phases of a sustained, ethnographic project. In other words: in the absence of big data, we still have the tools (if not the truth claims) of big data. We can utilize them to enrich our small-scale, place-bound ethnographic research in ways that are complementary.