Kim Jong-il Looking at Things
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|---|---|
| Blog | |
| editorial staff | João Rocha |
| On-line | October 10, 2010 (currently inactive) |
| http://kimjongillookingatthings.tumblr.com/ | |
Kim Jong-il Looking at Things ( German : "Kim Jong-il looking at things") is a blog that satirically deals with Kim Jong-il , the former supreme ruler of North Korea who died in 2011 .
content
The blog of the Portuguese art director João Rocha, which is located on tumblr, shows the official pictures of the North Korean news agency Korean Central News Agency , which depict Kim during his numerous visits to North Korea, and provides them with short captions.
Hundreds of photos show an expressionless Kim Jong-il looking at various objects from rubber boots to agricultural products to computers in the midst of a delegation. Kim always wears almost identical clothes and hardly shows any different postures. Rocha himself thinks that the comedy and thus the great success lies in seeing someone who is always portrayed as evil in the media outside of North Korea, doing something as harmless as looking at things. While propaganda normally seeks to make its object larger than life, the propaganda intention of these official photos, according to Rocha, is to show Kim, described as a demigod in North Korea, in contact with ordinary people. The contrast between exaggeration (within the country) and condemnation (outside of North Korea) on the one hand and the very trivial objects on the other creates an involuntary comedy. All you learn about North Korea is that the factories are thoroughly cleaned before Kim visits.
history
The blog went online on October 26, 2010. Rocha got the idea after he Propaganda pictures of Kim on the website The Big Picture of the Boston Globe had seen. The thematic picture collection contained a few dozen almost identical photos of Kim Jong-il, one behind the other, in which he was looking at different objects with very similar facial expressions and in identical clothing. Even after Kim's death, Rocha continued to blog because he still had 375 propaganda photos of Kim in the archive. The last picture was uploaded in mid-December 2012.
Kim Jong-il Looking at Things had around 500,000 visitors a month in 2011. Tumblr founder David Karp called it one of his favorite blogs on Tumblr. The Daily Mail published its own gallery of pictures of Kim looking at things as a tribute to the blog in March 2011. It followed the MSNBC photoblog , which brought a similar series of tributes back in December 2010. The online edition of Atlantics described a real KCNA propaganda series as a North Korean version of Kim Jong-il Looking at Things .
When Kim's death became public knowledge, the number of hits rose to 300,000 a day. This also resulted in reports in the German-speaking media through a report by the dpa . The blog triggered numerous parodies and imitators, the caricatures included Karl-Theodor zu Guttenberg , Christian Wulff and Christopher Lauer ; in Austria also Gerhard Dörfler . After Kim Jong-il's death, several blogs with Kim Jong-Un Looking at Things appeared, referring to Jong-il's son and new North Korean ruler, Kim Jong-un , as well as a blog Kim Jong-Il Haunting Things ("Kim Jong-il be haunted things").
Individual evidence
- ↑ a b c Vanessa Ko: 'Kim Jong Il Looking at Things' Has a Tumblr Successor , Time Newsfeed December 20, 2011
- ↑ a b c d Kate O'Keeffe: Will Blog of Kim Jong Il 'Looking at Things' Live On? , Korea Realtime / Wall Street Journal, December 20, 2010
- ↑ a b Brandon Grigg: Popular Kim Jong Il photo blog may live on , CNN December 20, 2011
- ↑ About , Kim Jong-il Looking at Things
- ↑ Paul Bradbury: End of a North Korean era: Kim Il-Jong stops looking at things , Digital Journal, December 17, 2012
- ^ Mail Foreign Service: Picture special tribute to the world's most boring leader: Kim Jong Il - the man who looks at things , Daily Mail, March 4, 2011
- ↑ Elena Grothe: Picture this, Kim Jong Il looking at things , December 1, 2010
- ↑ Urs Friedman: Kim Jong-il looking powerful , Atlantic Wire September 2, 2011
- ↑ Domestic politics "Kim Jong-Il looking at things": Kim as a joke . In: Zeit Online , December 19, 2011. Accessed December 21, 2011
- ↑ Gerhard Dörfler looking at things ( Memento of the original from June 7, 2012 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. , stadtknown.at. Retrieved on January 11, 2012
- ↑ Rosie Gray: Next Step For North Korea: 'Kim Jong-il Haunting Things' ( Memento of the original from January 13, 2012 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was automatically inserted and not yet checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. , Village Voice Blogs, December 20, 2011
