Last week we had a new co-op student start at work. I found out that she is from South Korea, which was interesting because I read a lot of news about that region, and this was an oppurtunity to get a sense of what South Korea is really like from an inside source.
Computer geeks tend to drool in awe when they see South Korea's technological environment. Their country is number one when it comes to the percentage of the population that uses high speed Internet, and about 70% of the population has access to the Internet. This
article is a little dated, but it says that of the 63 million people in the world that has access to high speed Internet, 10 million of those people live in South Korea. Interestingly enough Hong Kong is a distant number two on the list, and Canada is number three.
In either case, I asked my co-worker what high speed internet was like in South Korea. She said that the average speed is about 10Mbps. For the non-technical user, consider this: it takes me probably around 6-8 hours to download a movie (around 700MB in size), the same movie would take about 10 minutes to download in South Korea. Now
THAT'S video on demand. The real kicker is that the average cost of high speed Internet over there is about $20 CDN! She also mentioned that our various portable devices in Canada are very primitive compared to the portable devices in South Korea. She can't understand why people here are going crazy about iPods and cellphones with carmeras, she said in South Korea people can watch TV and video on their cellphones.
An interesting thing about such a connected society is that gaming has become a very serious matter. People who are very good at playing video games can actually become professional gamers, and they have a respected place in society. A professional gamer can make over $200,000 a year. Kids hope to be professional gamers when they grow up, much like how kids here in the West aspire to be sports stars. This is quite a difference in culture as I don't think professional gaming in Canada is taken seriously ... otherwise, I'd be getting all the ladies adoring my awesome mouse skills :P, and everyone would understand what frags were.
Gaming is considered a sport over there, they have three TV channels devoted to video game matches. You can even go to arenas and watch people compete online. Companies like Coke actually sponsor professional gaming teams. This is all so foreign eh?
I never knew gaming was such a big part of their society. Some people there get addicted to gaming and take it way too seriously though. I came across this article about a
South Korean man dying in an Internet Cafe because of gaming.
Here's a part of the article:
A 24-year-old South Korean man died after playing computer games nonstop for 86 hours, police said yesterday.
The jobless man, identified by police only by his last name Kim, was found dead at an Internet cafe in Kwangju, 260 kilometres southwest of Seoul, they said.
Quoting witnesses, police detective Oh Myong-sik in Kwangju said the man had been virtually glued to the computer since late last Friday and had no decent sleep and meals.
The man collapsed in front of the counter early yesterday but soon regained consciousness. He then went to the toilet where he later was found dead, the police officer said.
Gaming addiction is becoming a social problem in South Korea as my co-worker affirmed. South Korea is home to many game companies that produce a class of game known as Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Games (MMORPG). In a nutshell, it is a virtual world where thousands of people play in. Everyone plays in the same world. When you log back into the game, your character is where you left it, so it is persistent world. In essence, it's like having a virtual life. These type of games are highly addictive as the game never ends, and you can continuously improve your character. My co-worker says a lot of her friends back home play a MMORPG called
Lineage II which is developed by a South Korean company. These games are becoming such a problem that some people start withdrawing from the real world in order to spend more time in these virtual worlds. The government is considering banning kids under a certain age from playing these games as it is very easy to get hooked on.
From experience, I know this guy in computer science who got hooked on one of these MMORPGs. He was playing them about 10 hours a day. This doesn't work so well if you're taking 5 courses at a time. He failed most his classes, so the next semester he decided to only take 4 courses. Last time I checked, he was only taking 2 courses a semester, and was still doing very poorly because this game was eating up all his time.
However, widely available internet use isn't all bad. My co-worker was saying that it makes it super easy for people to stay in touch with family and friends. The country has this central online white pages which allows you to find people's e-mail, homepage, etc. fairly easily. In addition, it sounds like most people have websites where they can post anything they want, a lot of them keep journals and blogs on their sites. They've made website creation so easy that even grandparents are able to maintain their own websites. So, that's kind of neat. I know for me, probably only a small number of my friends actually have websites. I find these websites are totally useful for staying in touch with friends and family.
Anyways, I guess this article shows that technology is a two-edged sword. It is able to bring great good, and great destruction. Everything in moderation I guess...
