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| Fake Wedding Fools Korean Media |
| Staged subway ceremony conjures memories of 'Dog-Poop Girl' incident |
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Jean K. Min (jean)  |
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Published 2006-02-17 12:49 (KST) |
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 |  | |  'Wedding Ceremony' in subway? | | | It was probably the most-watched wedding in Korea since Princess Diana's televised ceremony in 1981.
After a moment of murmuring and hesitation, a young couple announced the beginning of their spontaneous wedding ceremony to clueless passengers in a subway bound for Gimpo Airport. Raised as orphans, they could not afford an expensive wedding in a luxury Wedding Hall, they explained to the puzzled passengers-turned-well-wishers.
Since they first met in the subway, they decided to get married in the very place they fell in love. Moved by an improbable event unfolding before their very eyes, the passengers applauded them for their courage and wished them the best of luck in their marriage. Some accidental well-wishers in the subway wedding, so moved by the couple's heart-wrenching story, even cried.
The unusual sight could not escape the watchful lens of ubiquitous camera phones in the subway. One blogger filmed the whole episode and posted it on his blog the same day. Soon it started to spread to the blogs of his friends and friends of friends, and by the morning of Valentine's Day, it had built up a buzz loud enough to incite the interest of a major news agency.
As it turned out, the subway wedding that touched millions of hearts on the net was a rehearsal staged by the students of an acting club in a local university. By the time they confessed the truth of the "wedding" to a national television crew, their real life acting stunt had been already reported again and again by scores of news media -- including OhmyNews -- as one of the most extraordinary events that shook Korean cyberspace this year. It was the kind of "feel good" news that readers anticipated on the morning of Valentine's Day, and news editors found no reason not to bite.
The short-lived urban fairy tale has a lot in common in terms of mechanism of diffusion with the so-called "dog-poop girl" incident that touched off frenzied on line vigilantism in Korea last summer.
Both events happened on the subway and were recorded with camera phones by passengers before they were posted on blogs. Once published, the impact was amplified exponentially on the Web by the power of word-of-mouth, coupled with the ease of digital copy and paste.
In the end, the buzz grew so loud that even the mainstream media could not ignore it anymore. Only this time the wedding episode made people feel happier and warmed their hearts -- albeit on a false pretense -- whereas the dog-poop girl was condemned a millions times over on the web.
Netizens cried foul at the tragicomic disclosure of the event, condemning the couple for breaking social trust. Some feared that "a future couple who would attempt a real life wedding event in a public space would face cynical glares due to this nationwide learning effect."
However one OhmyNews reader countered that such blame fell on the wrong persons. They were simply staging a benign rehearsal with no intention to trick the entire nation. The real crux of this episode would be that "any unknown bystander armed with a camera and Internet access can suddenly increase his social consequence one million times over" as OhmyNews reader drofnats commented.
"Netizens' fuss about online weirdos is one thing, and journalistic rigors required to verify the veracity of such claims is another," noted Lee In Bae, OhmyNews citizen reporter, in his opinion piece. Despite early suggestions by many that the event smacked of being staged, almost every news site decided to publish the news anyway, and OhmyNews was not an exception.
Lee Han Ki, senior staff reporter of OhmyNews who published the story Wednesday, defended his decision, saying "the fact that it was already generating a huge buzz among Netizens alone justifies publication of the story." He alerted readers that it was not yet confirmed whether the wedding and the purported orphan couple was real or not.
Increasingly fierce competition among news media on the Web to be the first to publish any eye-catching story and hence draw precious hits is the real culprit that tricked editors into this embarrassing blunder, Lee confessed.
The pace of news consumption on the Korean web sphere is now measured by hours, minutes and even seconds, in the case of breaking news. Mindful that competing news sites are already drawing millions of readers with striking -- albeit unconfirmed --stories, news editors feel huge pressure and it is hard for them not to jump at the bait.
However the blame may be directed at the wrong target again. The explosion of read-and-write Web sites created an immense appetite for anything to talk and gossip about among Netizens, who are ready to absorb anything branded with "credible names," rendering them vulnerable to potentially sinister attempts at online tricks by some con artists on a massive scale. The Korean blogosphere is already teeming with thousands of beautiful and heart-wrenching urban legends that posters claim to have "verified" and news media are ready to fill in the giant vacuum the Web has created.
But who knows? Perhaps the real purpose of communication is communication itself. The Internet has just arrived at around the right time and right occasion.
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©2006 OhmyNews
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