Internet Addiction in Korea: A back door to Korean acceptance of psychotherapy?

( Source: Kim Pierro)

Browsing the Asia-Pacific section of the BBC News website, I was shocked to find something there about Korea that didn’t involve North Korea, nuclear weapons, or congressmen beating each other up. I know, it’s very difficult to believe, so, once you’re over your own shock and disbelief, by all means I encourage you to not to just take my word for it and to check out the following links for yourselves. Spread the word.

Seriously though, I was happy to find an article on “South Korea’s ‘e-sports’ stars,” but while I don’t exactly count it as “news” – after nearly 8 years in Korea, I’ve probably already read about 20 similar stories - even a Korean studies guru old-timer such as myself learnt a few new things. Although much in the article is repeated in the accompanying podcast, there’s a great deal that isn’t, and considering it’s only 27.5 minutes long then you could do worse things over your morning coffee than listen to it.

The first thing I noticed is how many statistics kept popping up. Here’s a taste:

42% of Koreans have a blog

50% of 3-5 year-olds use the internet

There are 28,000 PC 방/Rooms in Korea

Most of those stats are believable, but without knowing where they came from, or how each was defined, then at best they’re pretty useless really, but at worst give the wrong impression. For instance, I’d imagine most of those “blogs” would be on Cyworld, ultimately a Korean precursor to MySpace or Facebook really, which most Western commentators would not consider to be blog hosts like WordPress or Blogspot, so despite the numbers the Korean blogosphere is very underdeveloped compared to its, say, American equivalent (for more on that, see Michael Hurt on how Korea’s early internet dominance has ultimately inhibited innovation – Korea is still very much stuck in “Web 1.0″). As for 3-5 year-olds “using” the internet, what does that mean? Checking their stock reports? Sitting on my lap while I’m trying to type up this post, throwing bananas at the screen? And finally, the last figure of 28,000 PC Rooms in Korea may well be correct, although I’m surprised it’s so few, but again, where the hell did the figure come from, especially as about 100 PC Rooms close down and open up every week here?

( Source: Marco Ro)

Those are the bad points, but I liked it overall. The reporter’s guide Berney Cho, described at about 3:10 as “a music producer and a writer on popular culture,” was pretty cool, but I wish I knew his Korean name, because I want him to give me a job to read some of his work, but I’ve been unable to find anything in the search engines on him. Still, I think he exaggerates when he says a few seconds later that:

“PC Rooms on the surface look like glorified computer rooms, but they serve, and do far more than that. In many ways they’re sort of the neighborhood tavern, coffee shop, nursery school…maybe detention centre, study hall…and so often after school, instead of piling out to maybe a football field, or maybe into an…er…say, after-school session, chances are they’re piling into a PC Room to play with their friends. The reality is that they are running around, except that instead of a physical space they’re running around in a virtual space.”

I haven’t been to a PC Room in about 4 years at least, but I doubt the fetid, dingy, smokey, instant-noodle and sweat-stained interiors of them have metamorphosed into the nursery schools(!) and study halls that he describes since. And liking nothing better than to be noticed being all intellectual and pretentious in a coffee shop myself (I’m very good at it), I can confidently say that wankers people like me still much prefer to see and be seen in coffee shops, that’s what they’re designed for. And being a chess player and computer geek trapped in a responsible father’s body myself, I’d be the last person to say that running around in World of Warcraft is somehow less noble and or useful intellectually and/or life-skill worse than playing a sport, but the former is still an unhealthier and inferior alternative if it’s done completely in lieu of the latter.

(Photo by chuhuicha)

But although his point that Korea’s lack of open spaces means that PC Rooms are one of the few places to go to unwind for instance, was simple common-sense, it never occurred to me, even thought the numerous parks my daughter has been playing in and I have been jogging in Auckland, NZ for he past few weeks has had a big impact on my future plans.

Much later, the reporter interviews Dr Ahn, whom the article says:

…has just completed a three-year survey of the problem, [and] blames the highly competitive Korean education system.

He believes excessive homework and extra classes after school may cause some children to retreat to a cyber world where they feel more secure.

That last line is what sold me on the report as a whole. If I was one of my 14 year-old students, getting up at 6 or so, staying at school until the evening, then spending 3-4 hours at at institute, then finally going home to eat dinner, do school homework, do institute homework, then finally get to bed at 12 if I was lucky, then I too would retreat with my friends to the comforting womblike environment of a PC Room in my limited free-time, and probably continue to do so into my 20s.

But it’s the next part that was the most revelatory. The quote below is from the article, but they go into in much more detail in the podcast, beginning at 23:10:

Government intervention

Today Jin Ki [a teenage internet addict] is nearly cured from his habit.

He and his mother have been on a number of state-funded internet addiction treatment camps.Addicts are sent on strenuous hikes in the countryside and are taught to identify birds, plants and trees.Above all, they learn to communicate and to play with other children – offline.

The government is increasingly concerned about the dark side of South Korea’s pioneering cyber culture.

KADO or the Korean Agency for Digital Opportunity not only promotes computer technology but also treats its victims.

Dr Koh Sam Young, a sociologist in charge of the main clinic, says the agency has 79 affiliated treatment centres across the country aimed specifically at teenagers.That is in addition to treatment programs at almost 100 hospitals and a mobile counselling van that drives around the city targeting in PC bangs.

In a nutshell, it’s such a revelation because these clinics are explicitly adopting tried and tested Western psychotherapy techniques to treat other forms of addiction, ranging from alcohol to child-pornography. This is important because many of the problems of the salaryman lifestyle that I’ve blogged about recently are compounded by a notoriously very very limited cultural acceptance of personal admissions of psychological problems in this part of the world, being, as in so many respects, the polar opposite of the (over) counselling culture of the US. Private psychotherapy practices are virtually non-existent, and like that post I link to above explains, companies are only just beginning to provide their own. But given the numbers Dr. Koh Sam Young describes, then it’s not so much as if psychotherapy (although hopefully not the the US level) will become culturally acceptable, but when, as a generation will grow up knowing someone in their peer group that has required it, albeit for internet addiction rather than work-stress.

P.S. Speaking of salarymen, there’s quite a salaryman-fest going on at the Economist these days if anyone’s interesed, with yet another article on the subject entitled “Sayonara, Salaryman“. Normally I’d be in like Flynn, but I’ve blogged about the changing salaryman culture in Korea and Japan so much recently that I’ll take a raincheck on the subject for now.

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