KJC Korea
Journal Central

The fundamental question surrounding the community is where do I feel I belong. Today the ‘community’ is extremely divided, and the cause needs to be ascertained. It is necessary to pay attention to the concept of ‘dividual’ in Deleuze’s ‘societies of control’. Dividuals are created when surfing the Internet using IDs and passwords. The pre-modern community was established on territorial contiguity, and the modern community could be unified on the ground based on the belief that people felt one through common language and mass media. However, as we enter today’s hyper-connected network society, a postmodern community or a divided community has become visible. Social media is at the heart of such kind of society. Unlike the one-to-many vertical ways of transmission of mass media, social media connects many-to-many horizontally. In this process, regardless of spatial proximity, connections by electronic devices and subsequent divisions occur. Humans are connected, but at the same time dispersed and divided. In this way, a digital tribe of dividuals is formed. Individuals become dividuals and communities are divided. In general, people are pessimistic about this situation. However, if the individual is a product formed due to the needs of modern capitalism, dividuals also have the possibility of being a starting point for a new human. The touchstone would be how to play the roles of a dividual.

On January 23, 1993, 22 Nepalese workers established the Nepalese community at Jongro Cathedral. Nepalese people gathered with the goal of survival, regardless of the class, ethnicity, religion, or political orientation. In order to secure the human rights and workers' rights of migrant workers, it has become a core subject leading the Korean migrant worker movement by actively participating in all rallies, sit-ins, and campaigns. In the history of the Korean Migrant Labor Movement, it has played an important role in securing labor rights to the extent that there is nothing to record, except for the organized activities of Nepalese workers and Nepalese communities. In Korea, migrant workers are still suffering industrial accidents, unpaid wages, abusive language, and assault, and more than 60 people are ending their own lives. Why did the Nepalese society stop fighting when Nepalese agricultural workers are being forced to work long hours under section 63 of the Labor Standards Act and live in accommodations that do not have air conditioners, toilets, televisions, and Wi-Fi connections? This article aims to analyze the process of change in the Nepalese community over the past 30 years and examine the challenges currently faced by the Nepalese community.

This paper analyzes the documentary film People in Elancia (Park Yun-jin, 2020), which deals with the game user community of the MMORPG Elancia launched by the Korean game company Nexon in 1999. This paper aims to explore how a utopia and dystopia are simulated for young people in the current Korean society through the documentary. The game space of Elancia, which is filled with bugs and where macro software is widely used because the server is maintained but not managed, is analogous to the competitive society under neoliberalism experienced by the game users in Elancia who spent their childhood under the IMF crisis in 1997. The high degree of freedom, various occupational choices of characters, and non-productive game play, which were regarded as the strengths of Elancia, no longer work through Nexon’s governance of negligence. Nevertheless, in Elancia, which was called an ‘abandoned game’, the game user community to which the director herself belongs forms a ‘utopia of failure’ that performs non-productive and non-competitive game play. This paper redefines the concept of a utopia through the community as one that is slow, fragmentary, and in process; in contrast to the traditional utopia, which is homogeneous, totalitarian, and teleological. In addition, the documentary reversely utilizes the fact that art culture is never completed in the post-Fordist era, but is always in process, and has the property of content that constantly commercializes itself, leading to management and operation of Nexon and changing reality. It shows the possibility of a new activism documentary in the 21st century.