[Linganth] Millennial North Korea: Forbidden Media and Living Creatively with Surveillance

[Ilana Gershon]

Dear Colleagues,
Today on the CaMP anthropology blog, Suk Young Kim answers Haeeun Shin's
questions about her book, published tomorrow, Millennial North Korea.

campanthropology.org

Best,
Ilana

Press blurb: North Korea may be known as the world's most secluded society,
but it too has witnessed the rapid rise of new media technologies in the
new millennium, including the introduction of a 3G cell phone network in
2008. In 2009, there were only 70,000 cell phones in North Korea. That
number has grown tremendously in just over a decade, with over 7 million
registered as of 2022. This expansion took place amid extreme economic
hardship and the ensuing possibilities of destabilization. Against this
social and political backdrop, *Millennial North Korea* traces how the
rapidly expanding media networks in North Korea impact their millennial
generation, especially their perspective on the outside world.

Suk-Young Kim argues that millennials in North Korea play a crucial role in
exposing the increasing tension between the state and its people, between
risktakers who dare to transgress strict social rules and compliant
citizens accustomed to the state's centralized governance, and between
thriving entrepreneurs and those left out of the growing market economy.
Combining a close reading of North Korean state media with original
interviews with defectors, Kim explores how the tensions between millennial
North Korea and North Korean millennials leads to a more nuanced
understanding of a fractured and fragmented society that has been
frequently perceived as an unchanging, monolithic entity.
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