How do you view N. Korea? (How do the pubic view this crazy little country?)



When I decided to delve deeper into the limited pool of knowledge we hold on North Korea, one question stood out: How do the public view this country? So after doing some initial research on this little communist powerhouse, my first blog, I asked the public what they knew. Here is what I found. On a given scale of 1-5 (Where 1 is knowing nothing and 5 is knowing everything, in regards to North Korea.) the SLA community that submitted responses averaged only slightly above a 2. Why is this interesting? Because also in my data I found that almost all of the people taking the survey had: 1. Seen/heard/read multiple, if not an ample amount of news reports about North Korea, and 2. Watched the film The Interview.


These two key points of data answers two questions that I had when releasing this survey.

  1. Was The Interview a source of information about North Korea to the people who had seen the film?


My answer: No, although designed to be a comedy and surely in practice it is, it certainly made North Korea mad, but as for my research it appears to be of zero informative use.



   2. Do news reports actually bring information about North Korea?


My answer: From what I have seen in my survey, apparently no, they do not. This answer surprised me, as I assumed that news reports would bring information, but apparently not useful information.


One other question I asked was what people's view on North Korea was:

I gave 6 options with varying degrees of positive or negative views about this country. Surprisingly I found that over 60% of people chose the option ¨(North Korea)Is a misguided and troubled country.¨. I expected people to side more towards an option like ¨They (North Korea) are evil!¨

The last question on my survey was a free response question asking about the takers general opinion on North Korea. I got some interesting answers. One of my favorite answers was ¨Asians man... They're gonna get us.¨. Some of these answers were useful some were… less so. Plenty were truly hilarious and a few actually held little nuggets of knowledge.


Screenshot 2015-05-12 at 10.06.24 AM.png

¨Asians man... They're gonna get us.¨


After seeing how people responded to this survey I saw a vast overall lack of education on the topic(With a few vivid exceptions).  I think for my ¨Change in your world¨ project, I will be informing people about North Korea and how they could influence us(As Americans) in the future.  One thing that this survey certainly brings to light is the reoccurring theme of how people (Or governments!) can take advantage of ignorance of their cause/means and use that to push themselves through the masses of opposition that is shown to more public cases.


My survey results. My annotated bibliography.


Signing off,

Elias


Comments (2)

Eli Block (Student 2018)
Eli Block

You do not have any photos in the blog post. Throughout the blog post I was wondering what I will learn about North Korea but it was about what people thought about North Korea what are you specifically writing about?