Me and OhMyNews haven't always been friends. Sometimes we have. And I've been very critical of the Korean news media in general in the past.
Yet, they are a major newspaper here, and are defined by the citizens reporters who contribute most of its content. Rather than see OMN as a monolithic thing, when an OMN editor contacted me recently, I took the opportunity to get the word out, straight from the mouths of foreigners, something that I am always going on about as being very, very important. Readers of this site know this.
Although some people take my ranting and raving, focused criticisms and fiery broadsides as disdain for Korea, I have always maintained that I write out of an inherent optimism; no matter how frustrated or angry I sometimes get, one might simply ask the question: Why would I continue doing this if I didn't, on some base level, think it could make a difference?
Well, opportunities such as these don't come along often, that being the chance to reach an audience outside of foreigners, preaching to the choir.
So I've agreed to do a column over there, entitled "Michael's Point of View" (sounds better in Korean: "마이클의 시선"). No, I'm not becoming annoyingly narcissistic, either – the editor thought that a personalized title would be best, even though I kind of bristled at the idea of making it a function of my personality. Yet, I agreed with the logic that rooting things in a personal point-of-view would be far more effective, since I've also found in my personal life that challenging many Koreans on certain tough social or moral issues works best when linking them to someone to whom they have affective ties, as opposed to grandstanding on principle alone; that's something I'd tend to do as an American, whereas I've found that amongst Koreans, the reaction when I stand up for gay or women's rights is: "Why? Their issues don't affect you."
One could get all Martin Niemöller and start talking about "first they came" for the communists, then social democrats, then the trade unionists, and then the Jews before leaving no one left for me, blah blah – but I've found that to be not so effective in Korea, where issues of morality and interpersonal ethics tends to hinge on established social ties with real people, rather than broad-ranging moral principles and grandstanding positions.
Hence, making it personal, and keeping things grounded in the personal experience as much as possible while making larger critiques generalizable to the greater society.
I hope to make this weekly series as effective as possible, so to this end, I hereby fish for comments as to how to make this as efficacious as possible, while also taking suggestions for things you'd like to maybe see talked about.
Thanks, OhMyNews, for what seems like a great opportunity!
