Jason Lim is a Washington, D.C.-based expert on innovation, leadership and organizational culture. He has been writing for The Korea Times since 2006.
Koreans often characterize their culture as a "pot" culture. No, I don’t mean the kind of pot you smoke; I’m referring to a pot as in pots and pans. This metaphor is used to describe a culture that quickly adopts the latest trends, ideas and outrages, only to discard them just as rapidly —much like how a pot boils water and then loses heat.
Remember the early summer of 2008 when the Lee Myung-bak administration faced the greatest crisis of its young term when tens of thousands of regular folks, scared that the government's lifting of its ban against U.S. beef would lead to mad cow disease, poured out onto the streets week after week? At its height, there were 80,000 people protesting the government's policies. The mainstream media had ignored this phenomenon at first since it actually started with an obscure online petition by a high school student who voiced the concerns and encouraged fellow students to protest. These protests were then covered by citizen reporters who uploaded them to online platforms, which propagated the news in real-time and led to the general public joining in the effort — mostly self-organized within the Agora forum on Daum — until it forced Lee to apologize twice and clean out his senior advisers' corps. Regardless of the veracity of the claims, this incident was notable since it was the first time when a significant political movement emerged out of Web 2.0 ether through an organic
Growing old is not great. I mean, in addition to random, unexplained pains, I still don't understand how I can pull a muscle while sleeping. But it does have its advantages. You enjoy the perspective that can only come from living through certain seminal experiences that you can't get by reading about it in a book or watching it reenacted in a film. When the Swedish Academy announced Han Kang as the Nobel Prize laureate in literature, it felt like one of those moments that would stay and reverberate for the rest of my life.
So, Korean boys and young men are taking the photos of their classmates or acquittances and superimposing them onto pornographic videos or photos for personal titillation, group sharing, and even distribution for money. Such pornographic deepfakes are old; however, the recent advancement of AI has made creating such deepfakes much more accessible and seamless. Gone are the days when deepfakes were obviously fakes. These days, a few minutes on a free app can produce deep fakes that look indistinguishable from the real thing except for the fact that it’s not. Add to this the anonymity of encrypted group chat programs like Telegram that makes discovery by law enforcement very unlikely.
As we finish the first week of the 2024 Paris Olympics, there have been the usual highlights, minor surprises, expected heroes and predictable storylines. However, what I've always found fascinating about these types of events are the unexpected athletes or moments that seem to grab the world's imagination and go wildly viral in totally unforeseen ways. So far, there have been two Korea-related moments that seem to have resonated universally and taken the world by storm.
It's fascinating how familiarity can blind you to the obvious that only comes to light when you see the same thing through the perspective of someone seeing it for the first time. That was the case in Seoul last week when I visited and stayed at a high-end Gangnam hotel for a week with two of my colleagues from work. These folks were not unfamiliar with big cities. One of them lives in New York, and the other in Arlington, Virginia, often touted as one of the best cities to live in America. So, they were as cosmopolitan as anyone else you will typically find in the United States.
Ven. Pomnyun is arguably the most popular and respected religious figure in Korea today. He is a household name, known mostly for his engaging Q&A style dialogue — Dharma Talks — with audiences about everything and anything they want to throw at him. Mostly, it's about their personal lives, cheating spouses, rebellious children, overbearing mother-in-laws and drunkard husbands being the mainstays of these questions.
I recently attended a huge conference in Frankfurt, Germany. I don't even know how many people from my own agency went, but it was a lot. Some of us spoke at different panels, some of us just attended, and some of us were there in spirit but had to meet with others who also happened to be at the conference. And that was just during the day. In the evening, there were other social (but really work-related) dinners and get-togethers that were just as important. While many of these seem spontaneous, nothing is. Everything had to be planned for everyone. And let's not even talk about the preparation that had to happen before the trip, with everything that's involved in going overseas. It's literally a months-long process.
I visited Frankfurt and Helsinki last week. There is always a stirring sense of anxiety when you go to a new place, especially one where you don’t speak the language and are unfamiliar with how everything works. It’s a weird combination of excitement about experiencing something new and the instinctive fear of the same. Underlying all that is a soft static of irritation that not everything works the same way it does back home. I mean, why in the world do other countries use rounded electric outlets at 220 volts? At least, there are Burger King and McDonald's restaurants aplenty.
The great eclipse of 2024 has come and gone. Several families from my son’s school even took their kids out of school for several days to jaunt off to various locations along the Path of Totality to experience the 100 percent coverage of the sun by the moon. We did something similar but wimped out and went to my parents’ house in northern New Jersey to see the eclipse at a measly 99 percent coverage. And became one of the despised people decried by the eclipse purists for missing the opportunity of a lifetime by a mere couple of hundred miles.