The Platformization of Emergency: The Politics of Platform in South Korea’s Infectious Disease Governance

South Korea’s early success in managing COVID-19 is often attributed to its 3T strategy—Test, Trace, and Treat—which relies on a rigorous digital contact tracing program designed to halt infections at their earliest stage. Central to this program is the large-scale collection of personal data and an integrative data analysis platform that synthesizes these data to quickly identify close contacts. By tracing the evolution of South Korea’s epidemic surveillance system from the 2015 MERS outbreak to COVID-19, this talk examines how a public health emergency became a “platform problem.” The platform, known as the Epidemiological Surveillance Support System (EISS), aggregates Koreans’ personal data to semi-automate contact tracing procedures. In this talk, Kim discusses how the Korean government and KCDC reframed structural challenges in public health infrastructure and the bureaucratic weaknesses observed during MERS as problems demanding technological solutions. EISS, which emerged from government-led Smart City projects, was envisioned and designed as an agile governance tool that would bring flexibility to epidemic management. The platform promised to automate labor-intensive tasks like contact tracing, streamline bureaucratic processes through data, and make the system easily “programmable” for future crises. Kim argues that this “platformization of emergency” operates as a techno-bureaucratic logic that has transformed Korea’s infectious disease governance into systematic regimes of surveillance targeting communities most vulnerable to public health risks. As a result, the focus of epidemic management shifted from addressing structural issues in public health to the identification and policing of “risky bodies.” 

Youngrim Kim is an assistant professor of Media Studies at Rutgers School of Communication and Information. Her work, situated at the intersection of digital media studies, critical data studies, and science and technology studies, focuses on the politics of datafication and platform governance in East Asia. She uses qualitative and interpretive methods to explore how digital platforms and data-driven systems shape statecraft and civic life. Specifically, Kim examines how large-scale data practices—such as pandemic surveillance technologies or environmental monitoring systems—become instruments of governance that transform notions of public interest, citizenship, and belonging. She also explores the reverse dynamic by studying grassroots engagement with these data infrastructures. Kim’s current book project, Infrastructures of Vilification, is a critical cultural examination of South Korea’s data-driven governance of infectious disease outbreaks from the 2015 MERS epidemic to COVID-19.