I love being surprised by events in life…In a strange way, finding out that the People’s Republic of North Korea now has a Facebook page may qualify… I found this bit of trivia as enthralling as finding out that Muammar al-Gaddafi intended to market a super car of his own design (look out Ferrari!) a decade or so ago… About the only thing left that would surprise me would be something like Hugo Chavez getting a reality TV show on MTV…
But getting back to Facebook’s ‘North Korea’ page, called: Uriminzokkiri ( I checked it out…), it looks like it could be the official government page (whatever that means…) but it is filled with a lot of comments which certainly wouldn’t exist in Pyongyang! Even more disturbing is the fact that the North Korea’s Facebook page has over 3,000 friends (after being online only a few days). I’m starting to feel more insecure now…
With my joking aside, there were a few questions which popped into my mind, such as: do other sovereign states have ‘official’ Facebook pages? And if so, how many have these edifices to vanity? I spent a solid five to ten minutes doing some searching (in Facebook) for other ‘national’ sites. I found a number of them, and now I’m even more bewildered.
North Korea has one, but so does South Korea. a number of European and Pacific Rim nations have them. I can see a bit of justification for some of these sites, since it is quite obvious that they are run by some state tourism board, in essence it is only some cheap marketing.
This takes me back to North Korea…why? So far, this site has generated a lot of snickers and is likely prominently displayed on any number of ‘wacky news’ sites. The site itself (as already mentioned) is filled with equal parts political nutcases, and those who want to give vent to some seriously snarky comments.
From some of the news reports about this event is would seem that the North Korea also has a Twitter account and a YouTube channel. There are many levels of pretty intense irony here; maybe Kim Jung Il has gotten the web 2.0 bug.
In any case, unlike most of the comments and news articles I have seen, I find that this topic makes be consider Facebook far more than North Korea as a topic worthy of some re-evaluation. I say this only because of the shallow outrage that this news article engendered. It seemed to be more about the audacity of North Korea, than the bizarreness of a sovereign nation having a personal page on a social networking site.
If I have North Korea as a friend on Facebook, what does that mean?
