DECEMBER 11, 2000 VOL. 156 NO. 23

David Hartung for TIME. More than a third of South Korea's 47 million people are logging onto the Internet.

Wired For Life
Overnight, South Korea has become one of the world's most connected countries—and Koreans are doing just about everything on the Internet
By DONALD MACINTYRE Seoul

ALSO
Player Power
Online gamers are in a league of their own
Virtual Vows: A couple live their lives on the Net
Viewpoint: How Koreans took to the new technology

Earlier this year, internet gaming company NCsoft found it had some unwelcome visitors. The Seoul company is the creator of Lineage, an online fantasy game in which players do battle in a medieval cyberworld with swords and shields and magical rings that change their identities. Players can swap weapons or buy and sell them using the game's cybermoney. So popular is Lineage—and so competitive its fans—that players started buying and selling weapons with real money instead of cyberbucks. (Rings were reportedly going for as much as $300 each.) NCsoft didn't like that practice, and barred two offending players from the game. Soon after, the banned players barged into NCsoft's office and demanded to be allowed back online. The company had to call the police.

That's how it is today in South Korea—the Internet seems to have made the whole nation a little crazy. Housewives are into it, students are teetering on the brink of addiction—even grandma and grandpa are developing a taste for cyberspace. More than a third of South Korea's 47 million people are logging onto the Internet—that's one of the highest ratios of Web access in the world. Over half of Koreans have mobile phones, and high-speed broadband access is coming in fast, far ahead of Japan, the country's traditional rival, and catching up with the U.S. The result: South Korea is one of the most wired—and wireless—places on the planet.

More astonishing still is how Koreans have embraced the Internet as a tool for living. They are going online to network, day trade, date and prowl for sex. Some have gotten married in cyberspace, others visit deceased relatives in a virtual memorial hall. Ambitious start-up companies are churning out content to meet the billowing demand, putting the country at the cutting-edge of new modes of online entertainment. Computer gaming, for example, has become a professional sport, with sponsorships, prize money and battles performed in public. "Korea is a laboratory," says Daniel O'Neill, executive chairman of QoS Networks, a Dublin Internet company that plans to set up shop in Korea next year. "You have a whole country that is a hotbed of Internet systems."

Being located in the most Web-crazed country in the world did not prevent shares of Korea's Internet companies from plummeting after the global dotcom bubble burst last spring. (The high-tech KOSDAQ has tumbled a grim 61% since its peak in March—even worse than the NASDAQ's fall.) But stock market woes and the wobbles of Old Economy conglomerates like Hyundai, have not made Koreans lose faith in the New Economy. Information technology already accounts for more than 10% of Korea's $400 billion economy—and that percentage must grow further if the country is to continue its economic ascent. With pricey workers and few natural resources, Korea has figured out it can't continue to rely on exports of ships and low-end memory chips to juice the economy.

ALSO IN TIME COVER: All Wired Up Their country has gone from being an online backwater to one of the most connected places on the globe in double-quick time. Now millions of Koreans are living the Internet revolution • Player Power: Online gamers are in a league of their own • Virtual Vows: A couple live their lives on the Net • Viewpoint: How Koreans took to the new technology JAPAN: Did Somebody Mention Pinochet? Peru's ousted ex-President Fujimori copes with exile in Japan INDIA: Reform Behind Bars Delhi's notorious Tihar Jail is now a kinder, gentler prison HONG KONG AND SHANGHA: May the Best Town Win The former colony is losing business to China's largest city CINEMA: The Chosen One Chinese actress Zhang Ziyi's effervescent talent pours through Zhang Yimou's The Road Home, and Hollywood is beckoning. But she still struggles to be appreciated back home TRAVEL WATCH Get Insured: No One Plans for a Shark Attack

Which is why Korea, with the single-minded aggressiveness that made it a name in a slew of export industries, has rallied around the Internet. Says Shin Yoo Jin, chief technology officer at dotcom Dadaworlds: "For Koreans, the Internet isn't just a technology or a new discovery any more—it has become a part of daily life they can't do without." Three years ago, games like Lineage didn't exist. Even if they had, nobody had access to the high-speed, broadband pipes needed to load their complex graphics. But in the past few years, Korea has done a lot of things right. The government put the building blocks in place, laying high-speed lines and encouraging foreign investment in information technology industries. It slashed red tape for Internet start-ups and deregulated the telecom industry with impressive foresight. The result: Internet access rates in Korea were dirt cheap just as the Net started to take off.

Today, more than 3 million homes have high-speed Internet access. That's double the number of just five months ago. (The figure in Japan, by contrast, is a puny 450,000, and dial-up access to the Internet is still prohibitively expensive.) Internet-ready phone lines are standard equipment in new Korean apartment blocks.

For younger Koreans, the biggest catalyst for the Web craze was the so-called "PC rooms": Internet cafEs offering high-speed access to the Web (though sometimes not coffee) for as little as a dollar an hour. They sprouted like mushrooms in the wake of the Asian crisis as Koreans thrown out of traditional jobs decided to take a gamble on the new high-tech economy. Some are crude, with exposed ventilation pipes and bare concrete walls, others are fancier, decorated with New-Age motifs and comfortable chairs. Three years ago, there was a handful of such cafEs; today there are at least 20,000. You can't throw a rock in Seoul without hitting one, and at any hour of the day or night people are playing games, sending e-mail, doing homework or looking for online love. Cho Jung Wan is spending up to 10 hours a day playing Lineage. "After collecting weapons and stuff online," he says, "I feel like I've gotten rich in the real world."

The PC rooms started something big: a national love affair with the Internet. The fast pace of life online strummed some impatient chord of the national character, and Koreans seized the Net as a tool to make their lives easier, more convenient and, sometimes, a lot more interesting.

In Korea, as elsewhere, the Internet is as much about sex as entertainment. In a society still deeply influenced by conservative Confucian values, the anonymity and freedom of cyberspace has provided an escape from old-style mores that many find oppressive, especially the young. So not surprisingly, online dating is hugely popular, particularly among high-school and university students. Skylove.com, a chat room, makes it easy. When a user logs on, he chooses an icon to identify himself. Other people's icons are available for viewing. Then he can cull candidates with the required interests or qualifications, such as a university degree. Usually, a guy clicks on a girl's icon and asks if she wants to chat. If the answer is yes, the couple pops into a private chat room and the dating dance begins. If all goes well, they'll agree to meet off-line, often that evening. This isn't necessarily about finding your soul mate or life partner. Skylove and similar chat clubs have made casual encounters between the sexes much easier in a society where Western-style dating itself is a relatively new concept.

Sometimes love does bloom. Just ask Choi Moon Sun, 27, and Kim Kwang Chul, 26. Choi was in a PC room, trying to stay awake while waiting to catch the first morning bus back to her home in the suburbs. Kim accidentally clicked on her icon and kept pestering her for a chat. Reluctantly, she agreed to talk. The rest was history. Says Choi: "If my [future] husband hadn't been so persistent, I wouldn't have accepted his call. I was afraid I might run into a weirdo."

But Koreans are discovering, like the rest of the world, that the Internet has a dark side. Many women have met weirdos online. Teenage girls are offering themselves for sex at chat sites, and police have set up a special squad to patrol Korean cyberspace. In a society where smut isn't readily available, easy access to the Internet is exposing more kids to pornography, says Kim Yong Hak, a sociology professor at Yonsei University. In a survey of 10 schools in Seoul, he found 10% of 11-year-olds had visited porn sites. With PCs in kids' bedrooms and PC rooms on every street corner, it isn't easy to turn back the tide. Says Kim: "With one key stroke, a child can switch from an educational site to a porn site."

Even if they don't look at the raunchy stuff, many kids may be spending too much time online. Song, 16, was bullied at school and turned to the Internet for solace. But soon he found he couldn't turn it off. At times, he would go 24 hours straight without sleeping or eating as he roamed the Web or networked with a growing band of online pals. "It was so much fun being online," says Song, who asks that his full name not be disclosed. But one day, "I realized I was addicted." His treatment began last May after his parents found him virtually living in a PC room. They checked him into the Net Addiction Clinic in Seoul, founded by psychiatrist Kim Hyun Soo. While addiction to the Net is treated much like other dependencies, kids don't have to go cold turkey: the clinic lets them log onto its computers for short periods. But they spend most of their time relearning how to cope with people in the real world. There's one core problem, however: kids who are good at games and other cyberentertainment gain status among their peers, and that pushes them deeper into a computer-centered life. "In extreme cases," says psychiatrist Kim, "these kids believe they are really growing up in cyberspace."

But some Koreans have found that cyberspace can also be a place for healing. In June last year, a fire incinerated a kindergarten holiday camp near Korea's west coast, killing 19 children. The tragedy shocked many Koreans, including Dadaworld's Shin Yoo Jin. Shin is building an elaborate three-dimensional city in cyberspace where you can shop, visit an art gallery or a police station, even do the macarena. He suggested adding a permanent memorial to the dead children in his virtual city.

An architect at heart, Shin created a spacious hall with slabs of virtual stone to house the memorial. Like the rest of Dadaworlds, it is a three-dimensional space—visitors use "avatars" to navigate a broad stairway and enter the hall, where pictures of the dead children hang on the wall. A selection of the children's belongings sits on a shelf below the pictures—a red yoyo, robot toys, a purple baseball cap. Visitors can click on icons to see more pictures and video clips of the victims or ponder over messages left by grieving parents. Reads one: "I still feel like you will call me on my cell phone and ask me to bring home hamburgers." Parents can even ask to see computer-generated avatars of their children. One parent took his avatar son for a walk in the garden outside the memorial.

Some parents were hesitant about the project, but now most visit the site once a day, sometimes more, says Koh Suk, the head of an association of the children's parents. He lost twin girls in the blaze. When the memorial opened last year, Koh still hadn't accepted that his daughters were dead. "Now I believe they are alive and growing in this cyberworld. It has become a source of consolation for me." It isn't clear yet whether visiting dead family members in cyberspace is the wave of the future. Even Shin concedes Dadaworlds may be a little ahead of its time. But then, that's what life's like at the cutting edge of the Internet revolution. Korea's Internet adventure looks set to continue—at breakneck speed. Advice to the rest of the world: grab yourself a magic ring and hold on.

With reporting by Stella Kim/Seoul

Write to TIME at mail@web.timeasia.com