2015, Vol.22, No.2

Informatization Policy 2023 KCI Impact Factor : 4.08

pISSN : 1598-3498
https://journal.kci.go.kr/nia

We explore the issues on online political participation study in Korea compared with international one. More specifically, we characterize Korea’s study trends as focusing on “who”is participating while international studies center on what the new “forms”of online political participation are. In other words, domestic studies try to show that online media play a role as a factor promoting bottom-up model of civic participation. Moreover, this function of online media is stimulated by the rapid growing of civic participation during democratization and citizens’deep disapproval of political institutions since then. However, previous studies are more interested in the expansion of participants, in particular, ordinary people. Therefore, the themes on conceptualizing and categorizing the online political participation seem to have been treated lightly. In this perspective, we need to view online political participation in a more multidimensional manner. In addition, we should pay attention to“ those who do not participate”as well as“ those who participate”in politics. Because the current media environment more tends to provoke citizens’political indifference than ever before. If it comes to that, we will be likely to face the circumstances worrying the democratic divide beyond the digital divide.

Due to rapid convergence trends in the digital pay TV market, differentiation among the competing medias decreases and substitutability is increasing. The current study aims to explain the effect of service substitutability among competing media on the size of domestic digital pay TV subscribers. For the analysis, the Lotka-Volterra model, an ecological competitive diffusion model, was used to obtain the basic model for a simulation study. A simulation was performed by adjusting independent variables of substitutability to estimate the size of subscriber for particular media. The relationship between the digital cable TV and the IPTV is identified as a predator-prey relationship and the digital cable TV is found to be superior to the IPTV. The simulation results showed that the increase of convergence and substitutability result in the decrease of the entire media market. Especially, the IPTV is estimated to face the greatest loss in this context.

The study tried to explore the possibility of expanding citizen’s participation in the case of Information Network Village(INVIL) with consideration of their different participation levels. As major players, central and local governments, INVIL itself, Central INVIL Committee and so forth have worked for the INVIL project and their importance levels of now and future were questioned and evaluated in the analysis. As a result, INVIL itself is regarded as the most important player for now and futrue as well. Central and local governments are also important to support the sustainability of this project. For future direction of INVIL project to be successfully sustainable, the specific roles of central and local governments were discussed and recommended to reduce explicit and potential conflicts among major players.