North Korea seen from space at night. Photo Credit: Lund University Research Magazine
This link includes a 40-page guide – quotes and links to articles, essays, opinion pieces, and reports — on North Korea’s information environment. Intended for strategic communication and Public Diplomacy practitioners, it focuses on information, broadcasting, cyber, internet access, propaganda, the activities of defectors, policy debates, and related topics. This is a special number in the “Seen on the Web” series.
One of my takeaways from reading Barbara Demick’s 2009 book, Nothing to Envy: Real Lives in North Korea – based on lengthy interviews with defectors in Seoul – was that even then information of the outside world was gradually reaching North Koreans. For many, the new knowledge overturned all they had been taught by the schools, media, government, and Party.
Donald M. Bishop is the Bren Chair of Strategic Communications in the Brute Krulak Center for Innovation and Creativity at Marine Corps University in Quantico, Virginia. Mr. Bishop served as a Foreign Service Officer – first in the U.S. Information Agency and then in the Department of State – for 31 years.
