Day 249: Cell Phone Culture

Koreans have an obsession with cell phones.

I made the strangest observation the other day... I was on the subway and looked around at the other passengers in my train car. And at least 70% or so of the people had cell phones in their hand! And of all those people, about a quarter of them were on a phone call, half of them were either playing phone games or text messaging, and the last 25% were just *holding their phones in their hand* waiting for a call/message or just for security. Cell phones are like security blankets here - people here feel naked and vulnerable without them.

Anyways, these were some staggering statistics to observe! I've made a conscious effort to watch for this several times while on the subway, and the numbers are always about the same. Amazing! It's like everybody and their dog has a cell phone here (or hand phone as the Koreans call them.) Wherever you go, there they are - people with them on the street, on the train, at the mall, while shopping for groceries, while DRIVING, while walking in parks...there's no escape from them.

Hand Phonism has infected every facet of this society. Besides people using their phones, or just holding them in their hands ready and waiting to engage in some phone action, phone vendors are *everywhere!* All the entrances to subway stations and the tunnels that connect transfer stations are literally lined from end to end with them, and SK Telecom - one of the biggest sellers of phones in the country, is as ubiquitious to the Seoul street scene is as Starbucks is to Vancouver. You can, in all honestly, sometimes pass like three or four or five SK Telecom stores, all in the SAME CITY BLOCK! How do all these places stay in business? Has the market not yet reach the point of saturation?

Besides the obvious visual presence of these phones in your day-to-day environment, these phones mean big business. Some of the most profitable companies in Korea are hand phone companies. And with new phones costing *hundreds of dollars* it's no wonder! Koreans don't blink an eye at spending over $500.000 CDN on a brand new phone. You can fly return to just about anywhere in Asia from Korea for the same price as a new top-of-the-line phone here. Companies here spend a fortune on marketing and advertising. Half the commercials you see on TV are for hand phones, and they all seem more like mini-movies/music videos/soft porn than a commercial for a new phone! And big famous Korean celebrities line up to star in them. Pop stars and actors across the nation can be seen belting it out or prancing around in these commercials. You've really made it in Korea if you've starred in a commercial for a major hand phone company.

And the phones you can buy these days are right out the 22nd Century! Phones here take pictures, videos, play mp3's and music videos, deliver your email and allow you to surf the net, can play TV shows (either live or you can line up all your favourite downloaded episodes), have a million and one games on them, and starting soon some of them will allow you to turn on appliances and lights and adjust the temperatures in YOUR HOME!

Holy fuck!!!

Now granted these are the fanciest of the fancy phones, but still...this is technology that is *years* away from debuting back home in North America. It's unbelievable! In Korea you're nobody if you don't have a cell phone. All I can say is, thank god I've got mine back up and running again! I don't wanna be left behind either! hehe... ;-)