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                                             May 9, 2023


                                             After a half-dozen re-viewings
                                             "Search: WWW" (2019) remains one of
                                             my favorite Korean dramas.

                                             And it's difficult to believe,
                                             but there wasn't much about it
                                             in these pages yet...

From a comment I made to slashdot:

  There's a korean drama I like quite a
  bit called 'Search: WWW' about a pair
  of big search engine/portals dueling
  for market dominance.  It uses an          It's set in an alternate reality
  interesting, I presume intentional,        most of us would much rather be
  device of simply pretending that the       living in.
  world is a better place than it is,
  it takes place in an alternate
  reality where, for example, women are      And the big tech companies
  well represented in the upper              don't typically just shrug
  management of IT companies, and the        and do what they're told by
  public at large really cares a lot         people in power.
  about internet privacy issues.


              You could probably find some
              plausibility quibbles about
              internet-era tech business,      SEARCH_DUST
              but overall they did pretty
              well for a television show.



From back in 2019, on the reddit /r/kdrama group,
rosieroti on "Search: WWW":

  "This is what you do when you have                     Counting the number of
  outrageous dramatic license, damn it:                  "sides" as three is
  write a steaming, OTT three sided conflict             interesting: two
  with unshakable loyalties, big                         companies plus the
  politico-technological assumptions, and                government?  But one
  some totally unrealistic but gorgeous                  company has two
  romance"                                               internal factions:
                                                         "Unicon" has a US
    "Totally unrealistic"?  Well myself,                 parent company (an
    I'd say that most of the relationships               analog of google), and
    are pretty believable-- there are                    a Korean chaebol
    actually four of them, and one more if               family that tries to
    you include the more than strongly                   control it locally.
    implied lesbian one--
                                                         By my count, there are
    The one exception I would say is                     *five* major female
    the developing relationship (after                   characters, including
    an accidental meeting, no less)                      the young blogger and
    between Scarlet and an actor from                    the chaebol matriarch.
    the trashy soap opera that she's
    obsessed with.  That one is
    objectively pretty ridiculous, but
    everyone loves that one.

    Yet another example that undercuts the
    supposed virtue of being "realistic".




  rosieroti again:

  "... and the conflict between private
  players and government seemed well-judged
  in the context of our 21st century
  'managed' democracies."

    Exactly.

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