paper1

I will reward your participation in this social endeavor with my positive feedback on your paper. 

Jina, I really enjoyed reading about Cyworld! One thing that kept crossing my mind was how similar (especially culturally) Cyworld is to American social networking sites like Myspace. One thing that hit me particularly was the concept of il-chon. In a place like Myspace, people have hundreds of "friends" and it seems as though they are really just collecting pretty people that make their profile look better-- more friends means I'm more popular, cooler, etc and that more people will stumble upon my profile through these connections. Although you didn't explicitly state it, it sounds as though il-chon is a bit different, in that people are much more selective of who gets to be il-chon. Is this the case? Maybe you could talk about this more in your future paper, especially in the sense of how people decide who gets to be il-chon and who doesn't. 

 I was also curious about the concept of stalking, since you mentioned it several times. This is an aspect of social deviance that I find particularly interesting, especially since I do use the internet to stalk some people from my past. From your paper it sounds as though stalking happens a lot at Cyworld, and that it's acceptable to some people and rude to others. Again, maybe this could be touched on a bit more, with examples of how people handle their profiles when they realize they are being stalked.

 Finally, I was wondering about the history of the word minihompy. Does it have a meaning in Korean or is it just a slang word that was created specifically for the site? How do members feel about this term?

I can't wait to read more!