This analysis of a successful online citizen-journalism news site in South Korea
conjoins the autocracy of the past with the first traces of a participatory democracy
less than two decades later to illustrate the possibilities inherent to the digitally
mediated communications. This study shows that in those dark times for a
democratic movement we can also draw enlightenment about the contrapuntal
relationship between communication and democracy in a marketplace of ideas
unshackled and freed from governmental or corporate interests.