hankyoreh

By Kang Tae-ho, Senior staff writer

“Summer 2010. For the first time in 44 years, North Korea participates in the World Cup. A lone North Korean player cried. WHY?”

This question begins the video “Internet: The Best Tool for Peace,” which was put together mainly by MiYooMo, an association for Korean exchange students in the United States. During the video, people are seen learning from Twitter and other sources that the man in the video is Jong Tae-se, 26, a Korean football player who was born in Japan and played for the North Korean national team.

“Transcending ideology to help us understand our common past, present, and future,” a caption reads. On Sept. 21, the video was selected as winner of the Internet for Peace Contest sponsored by Wired, a noted U.S. information technology magazine.

The song playing in the background of the video is “Become One,” which was written in June of this year by Korean students at the Berklee College of Music. With music by Kwon Jung-eun, a Korean exchange student at the college, and lyrics by Jongchan Marco Baek, the song calls for peace in East Asia, including North Korea, following the sinking of the Cheonan.

The video shows not only Korean exchange students but also students from China, the United States, Africa, and elsewhere making red T-shirts bearing the word “peace” in Korean, the same students wearing the T-shirts and singing “Become One,” and young people in countries around the world sharing the video through their cell phones and notebooks and feeling a sense of unity. “Peace is the most powerful idea in the world,” a caption reads, “and the Internet is the most powerful tool for peace.”

The four minute and 43 second video, which can be viewed on YouTube at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n_PUKL1ZgM0&feature=channel, had been viewed over 253,000 times as of Friday.

Inspired by the naming of the Internet as one of the candidates for the 2010 Nobel Peace Prize, the Internet for Peace Contest was designed to select the video that best expressed how the Internet is being used as a tool for communicating peace. More than 600 videos were submitted from around the world between January and August of this year, and following a viewing by more than 14 million Internet users, award-winning works were selected through evaluation by noted judges such as Italian film director Gabriele Salvatores. If the Internet is chosen as the winner of 2010 Nobel Peace Price, MiYooMo President Kim Seung-hwan will be invited to the award ceremony in Norway along with the Wired editor-in-chief.

“We thought that Jong Tae-se, someone who played for the North Korean team with South Korean citizenship, was the perfect person to transcend national boundaries and ideological differences to communicate a message for peace in Northeast Asia,” said Kim. “Without the Internet, it would have been impossible to produce this kind of video.”

Please direct questions or comments to [englishhani@hani.co.kr]