There was a time when "BOK" meant Bank of Korea...

... but now everyone in the K-blogosphere knows it stands for Blackout Korea. You know, that site that simultaneously gained praise and infamy for posting pictures of South Koreans who presumably were passed out from excessive alcohol consumption.

When it first came on the scene in late 2009, I chimed in with thunderous ambivalence:

Maybe I'm too jaded, but I find this site more disturbing than amusing. I'm referring to the content of the pictures, not the fact that someone made a blog about it (hell, it's a chronic problem in Seoul's "entertainment districts" and it's worth chronicling — chronicling the chronic heh heh). I see people passed out and I think of the dangers of alcohol poisoning. I see people staggering in or toward the street and I imagine they're about to become roadkill.

At the time, my reservations about the site stemmed in part from my feeling that that the subjects in some of the photo were just one or two bad decisions away from death or a serious maiming, which made it not that funny to me.

But I had no idea at the time that BOK would inadvertently end up creating a race to the bottom of sorts, a competition to provide the most outrageous picture so far, which would eventually get upped by someone else. This brought the posers — meaning people posing with their subjects, not phonies — those who made funny faces or stood near or behind the passed-out subject in what were supposed to be amusing scenes. And then came the assaults. Those who apparently put things on the passed-out subject, who was now a victim.

These were posted and responded to with relish by some, but a lot of others started expressing reservations, including yours truly:

Though I did suggest last year that the site was somewhat amusing, I agree that a few of the posted pictures do cross the line (the Marmite assault, the simulated ass rape, and perhaps this one below). I also hadn't been aware that, despite the supposed sociological justification for the site (see the interview link), the owner had been deliberately avoiding posting pictures of blacked-out foreigners because, "when I was starting it out I wanted to establish the site as a mostly Korean phenomenon." A tad distorting, methinks, but okay, at least now he's got pics like those familiar to anyone whose college life included keggers, except it's outside.

Frankly, it hadn't occurred to me last year that a string of such posts would encourage more and more outrageous behavior on the part of the picture taker. I would have thought that most of the shutterbugs would realize that legal considerations in the ROK over invasion of privacy might make it a tad imprudent to be making the happy face in such photos, much less the randier scenes.

To his credit the BOK site owner has removed the first link just above and removed the most incriminating photos in the second link.

Still, it caused quite an outcry. The Marmot called it one of the most poorly conceived blogs he's seen in his time.

And then the Korean media discovered it. That's usually where all hell breaks loose, but the response has been surprisingly calm. I mean, it's not like the amateur photogs were making and posting amateur porn or anything (see also here).

Let's face it: if you come to a new country and act like dip$hits, then you're going to piss off some of your guests. Naturally, there were some people among the Korean netizenry who were perturbed, and they responded angrily. A blog called "English teachers out" (ETO) was put up, received an angry response from anglophone K-bloggers, and then disappeared.

BOK's site owner himself responded, and I began to rethink my own public opinion on the matter. In response to BOK's protest that "there are blacked out foreigners on the site... there are less of them...because there are less of them in the country!":

That seems a tad disingenuous, since in the past you had been deliberately avoiding posting pictures of blacked-out foreigners because, "when I was starting it out I wanted to establish the site as a mostly Korean phenomenon."

Still, I sympathized with the guy and his contributors being so viciously attacked. ETO in particular was ill-conceived on so many levels, but one reason in particular was that not all the foreigners in the pictures were English teachers, a group it seemed hell-bent on demonizing. Moreover, many English teachers were outspokenly opposed to the BOK site and (as if this needs clarifying) most English teachers never contributed pictures to the site!

ETO is now gone, but a new site has emerged on the horizon: Blackout Mirror. What is glaringly wrong about BOM is that it attempts to go after the foreigners posing in the pictures. The BOM site owner, a person going by the userid Bintz. It includes some of the more incriminating photos of the picture-taking foreigners, with an appeal for readers to identify the foreigners.

And this is why I was prompted — nay, compelled — to speak out.

Bintz is angry, but I wrote a simple appeal asking him to take down the site (in the comments section of a well-thought letter by regular Monster Island reader Schplook).

I wrote to Bintz to tell him I understand his anger and his annoyance. I myself have railed against the knee-jerk Korea-bashing that goes on in the Korea-related English blogs and in real life. I really hate it, and sometimes I'm tempted to throw up my hands and just say, "God, if you hate the country and the people so much, why do you stay here?!"

BUT, I told him, I think his response may not only be counterproductive, but may also hurt innocent people. The BOK site owner himself is almost certainly not in any of those pictures, so even if the goal is to get revenge, it's almost impossible.

Another very important thing that Bintz and other angry Korean netizens should consider is that some of the foreigners in the pictures may themselves be innocent victims. They may have been with friends who decided to take the picture and they had no idea someone would post the for-private-consumption picture online for all the world to see. Some might not realize how the badly the posing makes them look. This is especially true if the "blacked-out" person is someone they are friends or acquaintances with. To put it simply, we don't know the context of the photos nor the motivation for contributing them.

And just as BOK's pictures may violate photography-related privacy laws, BOM may also be violating Korean law by putting up "information" about someone (in the form of an image) with the intent to defame them. I'm no lawyer, but it seems this is serious business, for much the same reason BOK posting them may be.

More importantly, however, it is wrong to go after someone "in real life" for something they say or do online (especially if it is not illegal or causing harm to someone else, as is the case with some of BOM's reposted pictures). I have been attacked several times "in the real world" by people who simply did not like what I wrote (foreigners and Koreans both), people who tried to get me fired, get me kicked out of school, or otherwise disrupt my personal life.

It is wrong, plain and simple.

Angry netizens like Bintz should also realize that if they really cause damage to these idiots' livelihood, someone might turn around and do the same to them. That's the problem: The cycle of revenge for revenge never ends.

I urge Bintz to take down that site. Be the better man.

Stay classy, Joey.

A few days ago I saw in the Los Angeles Times the story of an eighteen-year-old Korean-American student at USC who had died after suddenly passing out in her dorm room. It caught my eye in part because the woman's name is similar to that of a friend's younger sibling.

While it was not her, the tragedy of the story gripped me nonetheless, and in my head I played out possible scenarios of causation, including alcohol poisoning and the object lessons this. (For the record, the article lists no cause for the death nor any reason to speculate drugs, alcohol, or any other self-inflicted cause; I only thought of that possibility because of empirical knowledge with such outcomes.)

With binge drinking an unfortunately prominent activity in South Korea and among some Koreans outside of South Korea, the K-blogosphere is always ripe for a fresh warning of the signs of alcohol poisoning (see the latter half of this post), so I went back a few days later to check on updates on the story. Still no updates, but in the comments section I found something entirely different that compelled me to write about it anyway.

From commenter "Joey":

this is horrible. I didn't know fan death existed in America too! My heart goes out to her family.

Well, Joey, your heart apparently doesn't go out to her family enough for you to forgo taking a wholly gratuitous dig at South Koreans in an article about their loved one's tragic death. I mean, really, Joey? You're just adding impishly imbecilic insult to unfathomable injury by your glib comment. ("Joey's" comment was only one of eight, so it wouldn't be hard to notice.)

It really makes me wonder what makes some people tick. What kind of people possess such antagonism toward Koreans that they ignore the humanity of their target group? I was all set to write a post on Internet anonymity in light of this New York Times article, with a requisite nod to this Marmot's Hole post from 2006 that suggests a concomitant problem among South Korean netizens, when along came this object lesson.

In the pantheon of insensitive anonymous drive-bys on the Internet, "Joey's" isn't all that outrageous. It wasn't nearly as egregious as what happened in this post about the brutal rape and murder of a Korean-American woman in Los Angeles, which quickly deteriorated into a maelstrom of bigotry and lewdness which saw long-time troll Mizar outed in the worst of ways (I explain this in more detail here).

But just imagine what these people's families or friends might feel when one of them inevitably runs across this crude response to their cherished one's death. Imagine how you might feel?

Passing out in Korea (POIK)

Well, it looks like someone has dedicated an entire blog to passing out in Korea. He (?) calls it "Blackout Korea," though I'm not sure if all of his photos are of people passed out somewhere. (One or two look like people who — outside their home late at night for whatever reason — are sleeping anywhere they could find that's convenient; I suspect that, since I've done so myself, and living near Seoul Station, it's easy to find people doing that while waiting for an early morning train. But I digress.)

Anyway, I'm not going to steal the guy's thunder by putting up the most hilarious or most outrageous, so just go and check it out. Some of them are downright scary, since you know that the subject of the photo is just or two bad decisions away from death or a serious maiming.

Maybe I'm too jaded, but I find this site more disturbing than amusing. I'm referring to the content of the pictures, not the fact that someone made a blog about it (hell, it's a chronic problem in Seoul's "entertainment districts" and it's worth chronicling — chronicling the chronic heh heh). I see people passed out and I think of the dangers of alcohol poisoning. I see people staggering in or toward the street and I imagine they're about to become roadkill.

I wonder, with some of these photos, like the one of the guy passed out under a truck, if anyone thought to move them out of harm's way. A few years back my future ex-fiancée and I were walking near Itaewon one night, probably no later then 9 or 10 p.m., when we saw a guy drunk and slumped over sitting on the ledge that prevented pedestrians from falling down into the underpass below. He was teetering and it was clear that he could easily fall the twenty or thirty feet to almost certain death (by being plowed into by a car). I went over and told the guy — as politely as I could, since you don't know if he's a sleepy drunk or a belligerent drunk — that this was no place to sit, and I prodded him to walk with us across the street, to where we sat him down in some bushes. I seriously think I might have saved the guy's life that night, though who knows what other crazy sh¡t the guy might get into later.

Okay, then. Back to the spirit of the post. I quite liked this one below, especially because of the subject header: Tom, where is Jerry? WHAT DID YOU DO TO JERRY?!

I was wondering why someone would be in a Tom costume in Hongdae, but then I remembered, oh yeah, it was Halloween recently. I guess it's becoming a bigger and bigger thing in Seoul nowadays, though it will never rival the Waikiki Halloween parade along Kalakaua Avenue.

But I digress. Anyway, HT to Brian* for pointing this out.

UPDATE (November 2010):
There has been a bit of an uproar about some of the contributors to Blackout Korea going a bit too far. 

* Certain people have whined noted that I put a lot of links to my own site in other people's blogs' comments section, calling it naked self-promotion. What they may fail to realize is that I try to put at least one link back to the same sites, or related ones, for every link I put somewhere to my own blog (and I try to put only very relevant links to my own blog). It's all about sharing and getting things to and from other blogs. And you might note the side bar, while you're at it: I take up some of this blog's most valuable real estate highlighting the recent posts from the same blogs where I leave all those "off-putting" links to my own site.