If you were wondering about North Korea at the Olympics, Andray Abrahamian on 38 North brings his perspective on why the North Korean athletes seemed to be shunning their free cellphones:
When the North Koreans weren’t marching in the opening ceremony with the Samsung phones given to all athletes by the Olympic partners, the media speculated it was “likely in an attempt to control their access to information. Tight control may be part of an effort to prevent defection.” The former sentence is probably true, the latter probably isn’t. The biggest reason was probably that carrying the symbol of your rival and enemy country’s greatest corporate success is a worse public relations look than not carrying them at all.
Generally, Andray didn’t much care for the coverage of North Korea during the Olympics, which isn’t surprising since it’s a sporting event covered by sports journalists – not political journalists. Still, they should have picked up on this:
The media understandably obsessed over the symbolism of a selfie taken by South Korean gymnast Lee Un-ju and North Korean gymnast Hong Un Jong: it was a heartwarming shot of two athletes from a divided country sweetly and spontaneously smiling together. To the media’s credit, they generally resisted reading too much into the selfie. But there was less reflection on how weak a symbol of unity that was, compared to Sydney in 2000, when North and South marched in the opening ceremony together under a unification flag, to a stadium-wide standing ovation. They did it again in Athens in 2004.
Now we get North Korean missile tests.
