Budding diva, casualty of culture clash

Popular singer Baek Ji-Young, recently at the center of a nationwide scandal over the online release of a sex video, was a "casualty of a stunning clash of cultures" between traditional society and the Internet generation, said the Washington Post.

It said that Korea is one of the most wired countries in the world, with one third of its 47 million population using the Internet, but it is also a traditional society in which sex is supposed to be a private matter and premarital sex is a scandal. The pop star's scandal was a result of the clash of these two cultures.

The paper quoted a show business columnist as saying, "The Internet and other new forms of communication are changing Korean society very rapidly. But this still isn't America or Europe. Here, if you have premarital sex, you're treated like a criminal."

It also said that there was a "grudging suspicion" here that "the scandal was all somehow the fault of America, that Madonna and post-Madonna shock tactics have breached the censors and sensibilities of South Korea."

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