Creación de la Red Neuronal Convolucional Básica

As noted, the first major strategy of the policy framework was to ensure democratic and cooperative governance in the CI sector. Transforming the Korean CI policy community into the keystone of the NIS is what this strategy was all about. As clarified in Chapter 5, DJ’s most urgent agenda had been to transform the policy community from an instrument of industry manipulation into one of industry promotion. The ALP concept was frequently mobilized to indicate the government’s strong desire to establish a new type of governance system over the CI field. In this project, the most crucial agents were, of course, the civil servants who had previously been devoted to the country’s developmental project.

In the past when the Korean private sector was much weaker than the public sector in terms of administrative and financial capacity, for example in the time of Park Jung-Hee, the role of spearhead might have been required. However, clearly, the times have changed. The age when ‘hard working’ was more important than

‘creativity’ is now over. I believe that two kinds of role are desirable for the government at this time. Firstly, it should not be an obstacle to development itself and should get rid of other obstacles quickly. This couldn’t be truer for sectors which rely heavily on creativity. Creativity must be at the core of the cultural industries or the cultural contents industries. This also applies to other kinds of venture industries. I cannot think of any way in which the government could be more creative than the private sector concerning these industries.

As this quotation from DJ’s last CI Bureau chief reveals, civil servants certainly began to feel that times were changing and that the role of the government was changing along with them. Moreover, there was a fundamental change in the way they perceived their own identity. He continued:

I always talked to the civil servants at the CI Bureau like this: ‘Civil servants must be yard sweeping servants. When masters and customers need to walk through the yard, we must quickly sweep away the trash from the yard while staying out of the way ourselves. After sweeping all the inconvenient stuff, do not expect to be praised because that is what you must do as servants. All your policy practices should be conducted with this attitude. It is a delusion that you can lead the private sector’.

(Yoo Jin-Ryong, November 2009)

150 On the basis of this identity change from ‘spearhead’ to ‘yard sweeping brush’, the MCT sought to achieve the transformation of the policy community as a whole. In order to achieve this, the MCT paid special attention to at least five relationships as the foundation of a new type of network (see Figure 6.2).

The first of these relationships is that with other ministries. The democratic governance and cooperative network strategy was first applied to reinforcing the CI Bureau’s position within the MCT as the reliable control tower. In the early days of the DJ government, the MCT expanded its CI Bureau by absorbing several government divisions from various different ministries. By bringing together these divisions that had once been beyond the reach of their policies, the MCT was able to reorganize its own structure and thus drive forward more efficient and influential promotion works. For example, if the MCT had not absorbed the games industry division from the Ministry of Health and Welfare in August 1998, the striking growth of Korean games industry in the 2000s might not have been possible (cf. Table 8.1). In turn, without the explosive growth of the games industry, it is highly doubtful that the MCT could have expanded its support for various other genres of CI so confidently. Since then, amid keen competition, the MCT has tried to maintain ‘cooperative networks with other Ministries’ (Oh Jee-Chul, October 2009; Yoo Jin-Ryong, November 2009).⁴⁰

The second group of relationships was with CI promotion quangos, where ALP was most literally applied. As will be shown in detail in Chapter 7, the MCT utilized the same philosophy of ALP in formulating and managing different quangos, although the civilian experts that staffed them and the genres they covered displayed quite distinctive characteristics. Contrary to the conventional wisdom of the developmental state, the MCT sought to ensure the autonomy and expertise of the quangos to the greatest extent possible. Therefore, they recruited experts from the various industrial sectors under their remit and avoided interfering directly with their decision-making processes. Under the Roh government, this relationship expanded to the traditional culture and the arts sector. ‘Both referring to the case of KOFIC and benchmarking British Arts Councils’, the MCT transformed the Korean Culture and Arts Foundation (KCAF) which had been governed by a chief executive into the Arts Council Korea (ARKO) managed by the consensus of commissioners, thus completing an aim that had not been realized under DJ’s presidency (Yang Hyun-Mee, September 2009).

40 One of the notable examples is the construction of the ‘CI Promotion Committee’ which was composed of Ministers from related Ministries, in response to a prescription of the Framework Act on the Promotion of Cultural Industries.

151 Once the relationship with the quangos had been reorganized, the realignment of the third set of significant relationships, that with the domestic industries, followed naturally. Along with ALP, the ‘freedom of expression’ was a key driver in this shift.

According to Cho Gwang-Hee (September 2009), former inspector of KOFIC,

Although judges are relatively conservative in their society, Korean judges made quite progressive judgments as to the matter of censorship around the mid-1990s.

They were no longer able to turn their faces away because there was no legal logic or base to sustain censorship. My point is that, whereas the legal system usually trails behind developments in society, in that case the legal judgment walked ahead of the reality of Korean society. It was a peculiar case. The Ministry, the industry, and even society didn’t appear to be fully prepared for the constitutional decision.

Given this shift in the judiciary’s position, there was nothing for the administration to do other than abandon its old role as the headquarters of censorship. After DJ came to power with a major election pledge of ensuring freedom of expression, the MCT began wholeheartedly to accept the importance of freedom of expression for the future of the Korean CI sector, but also for the future of the Ministry itself. There is now a strong consensus within the Korean Culture Ministry that ‘ensuring the freedom of expression was the most important shift’ for the later growth of Korean CI (Oh Jee-Chul, October 2009; Lee Hae-Don, October 2009).

The fourth set of relationships to which the MCT paid particular attention was those with foreign governments, which were also changed considerably. Instead of insulating or blindly protecting Korean cultural industries, the MCT chose to let Korean CI compete with foreign products in the domestic market openly and squarely, and thus learn from them. The opening of the Korean market to Japanese popular culture is the best example of how this shift had a significant influence on the Korean CI field. In short, this shift from passive protectionism ‘in the logic of analogue’ to active exchange ‘in the logic of digital age’ did not only help enhance the quality of Korean cultural products by genuine competition, but also ‘brought about new chances to expand the market’ for Korean CI abroad (Oh Jee-Chul, October 2009). Since then, the opening has functioned as an archetypical reference point whenever the MCT deals with the matters concerning cultural exchange with foreign governments. For instance, in preparations for the FTA agreement with the US April 2007, Roh’s MCT cut the longstanding screen quotas by half from 146 to 73 days a year, and also reduced broadcasting quotas, from 25% to 20% for films and from 35% to 30% for animation. According to President Roh (2007), this decision was made against the logic that ‘to become the world number one, Korean CI must survive competition especially from the US’.

152 The final set of relationships that the MCT readdressed was those with local government in Korea. Activating local cultural and economic conditions and thus ensuring balanced development across the land had been one of the key rationales of CI promotion policies from the early days. To realize this objective, the MCT ‘used the project of CI clusters as the contact point with local governments’ (Oh Jee-Chul, October 2009). After the legislation of the ‘Framework Act’, many local CI clusters were constructed with the help of matching funds from the MTC. As a result, the MCT was able to designate official

‘CI quarters’ in eight cities in 2001, with a promise to support 30% of total construction expenses (MCT, 2002a: 711). Along with the promotion of CI clusters, the MCT also furnished a variety of support to ‘core cities’ in establishing and managing their own ‘CI promotion centres’. This aimed to ‘build up the national network’ through which the key information and experiences of CI policy making could be systematically developed and shared between the local/regional core cities (ibid.: 713).