Being well-connected

I heard somewhere once in the beginning of the US Internet boom "If you're not connected, you're irrelevant". While I can't argue with that, I can't totally agree with it, either. The goal of I'm sure many people is to get to a level where you can dictate when the phone/crackberry/email will be there at your beck and call and not vise-versa. This is the most connected country in the world, and I don't know the full stat, but there's more internet connected people around here than the US per capita (since there's 300 million of us and 43 million of them).
But what are the dangers of being TOO connected? The only other country that was probably better connected (and just as prone to mass demonstrations) was France in the 1980s. Their phone system has had a rudimentary e-mail system on it since the 1970s. So it's been really easy for the truck drivers to go on strike, because they can all connect that way. As their population shifts with the influences of the Arabs, it'll be interesting to watch what happens.
So with President Bush in town, they're mad at him about the beef thing. Beef imports from the US were halted due to concerns of mad cow disease and just recently resumed. So people are upset here- I don't recall anyone in Nebraska holding demonstrations against Korea for not buying our beef- then again, I wasn't paying that much attention. They could have sent some people over here to promote the stuff for all I know. But in a world economy, you have to be wary of any bad Public Relations snafus because during 'protest season' in Korea, you don't want to be the reason they're out there. I'll have to research how they all organize, but what if Al Gore had invented the Internet prior to the 1968 Tet Offensive? Would there have been more students involved?
Ask a Taxi driver here (as he's busy cutting ME off in traffic) if he's doing well financially and he'll probably say no and blame the economy. Everything is the economy. If I could understand the news around here I wonder what they'd say about it. We get a lot of feedback from the US media outlets about the perceived current economic situation, so I'd imagine it's pretty similar in Korea.
They have TV's in their cel phones and you see the people here watching them on the subways. They have good reception down there. They love their technology toys here. I don't know what they have here, but I'm sure it's all pretty nice. Maybe I could figure out how to build a really fast laptop or something. But until I can read Korean, it's probably not going to happen.
Bottom line, they have a beef with our beef and we literally don't have a beef with them over it. They advertise that all the beef is from Australia and not the US- and they're trying to set a better policy with it here. This president is one that's more conservative and gets along better with the US. Not that it matters, we're not going to pull 30,000+ troops out and let the N Koreans come down here and take everything.
My $600 car has a broken door handle. I'm interested in how it's going to look after it gets fixed, but there's not exactly a shortage of Daewoo Prince parts. It's just a pain in the butt to open the passenger door to open the driver's side. But it shouldn't cost much to get it fixed, either. Maybe I'll get the horn fixed so I can join the native drivers here at honking all the time.