Skip to main content

Analyze

South Korea

Misria

Environmental harm and the safety are often the key categories and concepts used when citizens and activists have advocated for changes to US military infrastructure in South Korea. By Osan Air Base in Pyeongtaek South Korea, the environmental costs of US military infrastructures often call on the citizens who live near the bases. In this below a new concrete wall built by the US military had blocked the natural water flow, leading to flooding just outside the base during heavy rainfall. Formally all environmental concerns are mediated through a clause called Known Imminent Substantial Endangerment Clause which asks that citizens must prove bodily harm has been inflicted due to environmental harms caused by the US military in order to receive redress. The US military often chooses to ignore claims of US military infrastructure effecting the daily lives of citizens who live near the occupation as the local governments and lawyers are often hesitant to approach the US military about grievances due to the financial support the city receives for hosting US military infrastructure. While environmental protections exist, when they are used and how they are used are often dictated by the US military who are not lawfully accountable for the citizen's livelihoods or concerns with US military infrastructure. In the case of this flooding incident, an activist organization was able to pressure the local government to make a complaint. It resulted in the construction of a drainage system which sits outside of the US military base and inside the property of a local citizen's land. Because all US military infrastructure technically maintains control over the land 3 past it's actual construction it remains up for debate whether the construction of the drainage system should be seen as a base expansion or not.

Cho, Tony. 2023. "Drainage system for Osan Air Base in reaction to flooding outside its borders." In 4S Paraconference X EiJ: Building a Global Record, curated by Misria Shaik Ali, Kim Fortun, Phillip Baum and Prerna Srigyan. Annual Meeting of the Society of Social Studies of Science. Honolulu, Hawaii, Nov 8-11.

Archiving for everybody?

ATroitzsch

For me it seems like the Internet Archive gives the possibility to participate to everybody - so if you think this webpage should be archived, you can just do it by yourself, everybody who has a free account on the internet archive, can add something to the archive - but besides this, they are having a lot of partnerships with libraries and other institutions to be always behind important web pages that should be archived.  

Frozing time

ATroitzsch

The most interesting part of this archive (which helped me to find information about the chemical accident that happened 1993 in Höchst AG) was the wayback machine: The “internet archived” saves a very huge amount of webpages (475 billion web pages) in different moments in time, so that even if information are not available on websites anymore or the websites/ companies do not exist anymore, in the archive they can still be found. Extending the idea of “archiving the internet itself” from 1996, the “internet archive” also started to build up a library, where books, audios and videos which are running on free licenses can be found.

Archiving digital text-data

ATroitzsch

It is not designed to remember data related to a certain topic, but more generally an archive where especially websites of different institutions, NGOs, companies etc. are saved (“Wayback Machine”). It is strongly related to a question of archiving digital text-data, for example websites.