2020, Vol.18, No.1

Civil Society and NGO 2024 KCI Impact Factor : 0.84

pISSN : 1599-8568
https://journal.kci.go.kr/civil&NGO

This study try to diagnose the civil society of Korea by using the state-market-civil society relationship as one axis and the forms, values and public sphere as another. First of all, if we look at the level of the forms, we found that the restructuring from advocacy to social services was being carried out in terms of influence and number. It also confirmed the increase in institutional participation and direct, civic actions of ordinary citizens. According to this study, the epicenter of the crisis in civil society is the area of value, which has everydayized verbal abuse, hatred, hostility and distrust. Specifically, tolerance, mutual respect, politeness and courtesy within groups or in a circles are not to be expanded to civicness as public ethics across civil society. The public sphere is also undergoing structural changes from the intellectual public sphere, which was dominated by some media, politicians, bureaucrats and experts, to the civic sphere, where autonomous individuals are central. To make the ecosystem of Korean civil society healthy, it is imperative to institutionalize citizenship-oriented democratic civic education to enhance tolerance and nonviolent values, and to expand inter-religious ecumenism.

As a response to the current trends that the discourses of inter-generational conflict and inequality is overwhelming in the media, this paper, on the other hand, illuminates the reality of generational cleavages in South Korean social structure and politics on the basis of previous studies, and, on the other hand, traced the semantic structures and the discourse historical processes of the generational discourses that have been highlighted in the major daily newspapers. The results of this study are as follows. First, the generational cleavages in the 2000s do not show a consistent feature in diverse aspects including employment, income, welfare, ideology, value orientation, and voting behavior, but have a more complex structure in which the structural positions and the attitudes of different birth cohorts vary at each level. Second, the discourses of ‘386’ generation and ‘youth’ generation in the mass media have spread an image of reality that distorts and oversimplifies the actual generational cleavages in South Korean society. The discourses on the ‘young 386’ elites, which emerged in the late 1990s, transformed into the hate discourses against the ‘progressive 386’ from the era of Roh Moo-hyun administration, and then extended into the hate discourses against the ‘386 generation’ in the sense of an entire birth cohort.

Social media users are rapidly increasing worldwide. The study analyzed e-social capital formation and offline citizen participation of South Korean social media users. The research methodology utilized the results of a survey to measure the social capital of South Korean social media users. As a result of the research, first, social media users in South Korea are accumulating e-social capital with strong norms and networks. Second, the e-social capital of South Korean social media users has a positive causal relationship with offline citizen participation. Third, the research confirmed the virtuous cycle effect of offline citizen participation according to the use of social media through quantitative analysis.