Contextualizing the ideas of technology in Korea—Questions of technology and early modern experiences

In the early to mid-2000s, Korea was touted as a strong IT (information technology) nation. But its IT success story has faded into the background less than half a decade’s time. Critiques hold among others the problem of hardware-oriented, commercialistic, and consumerist nature of IT environment including the centralized, statist IT governance responsible for hindering an IT take-off in Korea. This problematic environment of IT is fundamentally a material consequence of particular ideas of technology Korean society maintains—ideas of hardwarism, commercialism, and consumerism. Then the important question is the origin of these ideas. A large body of research argues the national modernization drive of the 1960s as an embryonic momentum in which hardware-centric, commercially oriented, and consumerist ideas of technology were disseminated in earnest. Persuasive as this argument is, the question still remains concerning how such perceptions about technology were embraced by the general populace at that moment with outright enthusiasm. This study argues that they were already gestated during the nation’s initial contact with modernity mostly by way of Japan in the context of the imperialistic world order of the late 19th century. And embedded as a paradigmatic structure, these ideas have been critical in the shaping of the trajectory of technology development and broadly a basic framework of modernization in Korea.