Cyworld

The mention of Korea’s Cyworld in Chapter 2 of How the World Changed Social Media (page 13 for reference) as one of the first players in social media history brought back all sorts of memories for me. I had forgotten about Cyworld’s existence for years and had not thought about it until it came up in the readings, which triggered all sorts of nostalgia.

So, a little background information on myself: I was born in Korea and eventually moved to America, but I did attend part of elementary school back in my home country, specifically 4^th and 5^th grade, the time where I feel like many kids start using social media frequently (at least, this was my experience in Korea at the time).

Although Cyworld has been irrelevant for many years now, it was THE internet site to be on back in the day. Everyone had Cyworld, from your friends, neighbors, and even my own grandparents. I remember spending hours on the website after school just going on my friends’ page and writing/commenting things and then going back to mine to see what my friends had commented or wrote back.

When I was finally able to log back on to my Cyworld account after many tries, I was disappointed to see that the layout of it has changed (possibly a last-ditch attempt to revamp its site and attract users again?), but I found an image from Google that showed what it looked like back in the day:

Source: http://www.stefanhayden.com/blog/2005/07/14/chris-pirillo-cyworld-and-social-networking/

So this was the basic layout of your personal page, and your friends can basically come visit your page and write things on your equivalent of the Facebook “wall” or “timeline.” In fact, you can check how many visitors/views you got every day and that was a big deal. The article talked about reciprocity being a crucial factor of Cyworld, and this was indeed true. Some experts from my old page include my friends saying something along the lines of “I came~~ Come visit my page” and all the other posts were variations of that. Essentially, friends would just go back and forth visiting each other’s pages and commenting something to indicate their presence. If you visited someone’s page but they did not reciprocate, you were allowed to say “why didn’t you come?” (disclaimer: this was my experience as a ~5^th grader; other age groups may have used it in slightly different ways but I think the basic concept was the same)

Now that I think about it, I am not sure why I spent so much time participating in this because it seems silly to just go to my friends’ pages and post something just so that they could come to mine and return the favor. But obviously, Cyworld was incredibly popular at that time since almost everyone in Korea was using it to some degree.

I did not consider why Cyworld was so popular in Korea but not elsewhere until the article mentioned that part of it could have been due to norms and expectations of its culture. This may have some truth in it. However, as far as I can tell, this reciprocity-heavy nature of Cyworld has not been replicated or brought on to other modes of social media, such as Facebook. An anthropological study of Cyworld when it was still in its full throttle would have been very interesting to see and read about.