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In 2014, the South Korean ferry, Sewol, sank. In sinking, it took with it 304 lives, as well as initiated broad public dissent that lasted several years. In this study, we investigate how online social media users employed and manipulated the emotions toward this disaster for political purposes. By the utilization of digital humanities methodologies (i.e., topic modeling and frequencies) on the data collected from selected Facebook accounts, we compared different strategies of online engagement with the intersection between mass death commemoration and political activism. In particular, we explored the delegitimization of President Pak Kün-hye, her impeachment, and the resultant elections in 2017.
Quantitative and qualitative analysis revealed that different social actors manipulated their audience's emotions through posts on their Facebook walls in a manner that politicized the more personal mournful discourse. These social actors associated the disaster with the presidents ineptness, especially after her corruption was revealed in the November 2016 scandal. From that point onward, the online memorialization of the Sewol's victims became a weapon in the broader efforts to oust the president and to change the political system.
Keywords: digital humanities, Sewol disaster, Facebook, affect, social media
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Introduction
Disasters are events that create social reactions, political changes, and affect laden discourses that resonate years later. In contemporary South Korea, such ripples are augmented throughout social media and other online communication forms, which can operate with little supervision or direction from political and financial establishments. Just such a disaster, that is, the sinking of the Sewol ferry in 2014, is explored here with the use of methodologies from the digital humanities. This was conducted in order to learn how in its aftermath the internet was harnessed for activism by different kinds of social actors. Social media discourses have been utilized in order to complement protests that occur constantly in the city, but they have not necessarily taken the same directions. For example, politicians who rarely visited the protest camp referred to the disaster in their speeches and social media posts; further, protesters discussed the disaster and the people they blamed for it differently, such whether they were chatting with their peers during the protests or when they were appealing to the larger audience of their online...