South Korea’s Hot-Button Medium

BUSAN, South Korea — On Dec. 10, a handwritten, politically charged poster appeared on a bulletin board at Korea University in Seoul, one of the country's top institutions of higher education. It began and ended with the same question: "How are you all doing?"

This simple query hit a nerve. A photograph of the poster went viral on the Internet. Students across South Korea started posting their own political notices on campuses (and pictures of them, too, appeared online). High school students, office workers and housewives joined in, writing posters to air political grievances and posting them in public and on the web.

Echoing the plain bureaucratic style of political placards from the military dictatorship of Park Chung-hee — who ran the country from 1963 until his assassination in 1979, and who was the father of the current president, Park Geun-hye — the Korea University poster made references to a hodgepodge of hot-button political issues: the more than 4,000 rail workers who were laid off under a national privatization plan; a villager from Bora in the southeast who committed suicide in an apparent protest of government land grabs that are part of a nuclear-development project; and the National Intelligence Service's alleged interference in the 2012 presidential elections.

Jeon Hyun-sik, 22, a student at Korea University, told The Hankyoreh daily newspaper that political posters usually urge people to do something. "But I was struck by how this one asked us how we're doing," he said. "I ended up thinking about myself and a lot of other things." Another student, Lee Min-ji, a freshman in a Daejeon high school, criticized the television news in her poster, which went viral, asserting that it is slanted toward the government. A housewife's poster at Korea University said that she was sorry she had taught her kids to focus so intently on making money.

Handwritten political posters — often composed in an artless and unadorned style, usually just words on plain white paper — were ubiquitous in South Korea in the 1970s and 1980s and were one of the few outlets available for expressing political views. Most posters were anonymous and put up under the cover of night. From time to time, the university authorities and the police would clear off the walls.

The posters continued to appear in public even after full civilian rule was established in the early 1990s, but they started to feel outdated, more like mere graffiti than anything else. When I was a graduate student in the early 1990s, posters still covered sections of the campus walls, but like most students I ignored them.

Then along came the Internet. In the mid-1990s, web bulletin boards replaced handwritten posters, which began to disappear: People could hope for bigger ripple effects of their views online.

There were no fresh facts, shocking revelations or radical opinions in the poster that suddenly appeared last month at Korea University. But it did expose the worries of frustrated and disaffected young people who feel they've been left behind by globalization.

Economic concerns, like low salaries and high rents, are widespread. College students are angry about expensive tuition and dim employment prospects. Support for the rail workers, another common cause, reflects concerns among young people that the rail privatization plan will start a trend, leading to higher costs for utilities and health care as they too become privatized, and to the end of the era of the coveted permanent government job.

The issue that seems to have most galvanized the poster writers is the scandal involving military and National Intelligence Service agents who carried out online campaigns during the 2012 presidential race to manipulate public opinion in favor of Park Geun-hye, who won the presidency by one million votes. Eleven officials in the Defense Ministry's cyberwarfare unit are accused of spreading 2,100 messages praising Ms. Park. And, in a separate case, a team of N.I.S. agents is being tried for sending out millions of posts on Twitter and news websites in support of Ms. Park. The president has denied having had anything to do with the online campaigns, saying repeatedly that she had not benefited from them.

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