Interrogating 'digital Korea': mobile phone tracking and the spatial expansion of labour control [Paper in themed section: Riding the Korean Digital Wave. Yecies, Brian; Lee, Kwang-Suk and Goldsmith, Ben (eds)]

This study investigates the realistic conditions of ‘digital Korea’, especially as they are exemplified by the Samsung SDI scandal in South Korea. Samsung SDI, the world's largest plasma TV maker and a subsidiary of the Samsung Group, has fallen under suspicion due to using illegally cloned mobile phones to track the location data of some activist workers who tried to organise a union. The study stresses that this example of mobile tracking represents the shady side of mobile phone use created by management's excessive desire for labour control, and confirms that mobile tracking techniques make possible the spatial expansion of the scope of power. The spatial vocabulary of power is not totalitarian, but dispersed and nomadic in action, and resides in the space of ‘flows’ constructed by electronic impulses. This study discloses that, for private corporations, mobile tracking facilitates a form of efficient, invisible labour control over ‘targeted’ workers, even outside the workplace. It concludes that the control of labourers in Korea has been reinforced by the confluence of business interests, the under-developed political system and a societal lack of interest in privacy.