by Jinsun Yoo 

What’s the first thing that comes to your mind when you think of Korea? It can be the mobile phone of Samsung, problems with North Korea, or possibly nothing! For those who are not familiar with this small country, here’s the brief but interesting story about Korean society.   If you happen to visit Seoul, the capital city of South Korea, you might be astonished or even disappointed to see how it seems so ‘confusing’. You can see thousands of cars everywhere, competing skyscrapers, and most surprisingly, several hundreds years old traditional palaces just among them which one might think should never be there. Beautiful ancient architecture and huge LCD television screens with endless stream of advertisement, it must be strange and repulsive eyesore to most of the foreigners who first visit this city.     

 Tradition and modernity, I can say these two contradictory attributes are the keywords of Korean society now. At a glance, it seems that they are not really making any harmony or congruity unfortunately, just like the awkwardness of the lonely palace in the middle of skyscrapers. However, if you slowly look around the country, get along with the people, and become to know about the their ways of living, you might have the moment of realization that there is a harmony somewhere in this society, which is brought from the coexistence of the two extremes; tradition and modernity. Korea has been called as ‘the country of morning calm’, ‘the Eastern country of politeness’. Mainly based on Confucian culture, manner of respect and politeness is the first virtue that one should keep in mind in life, and this can be found in almost every part of Korean culture. With that, strong solidarity and feeling of connection between people is the biggest characteristic of their values. The easiest and most simple example of this can be found in Korean language habit, the frequent use of ‘we’. Korean people say ‘our home’, ‘our family’ ‘our country’ instead of ‘my’.

This unconscious phenomenon shows that how important the relations and togetherness are for them.  Here, we can find the noticeable coexistence of this tradition with the modern life full of high technology. It is such that, however new IC technology developed, and whatever brand new machine is made, it must have some kind of emotional concept of ‘relation’ to succeed in the Korean society. That’s why the information and communication industries of Korea are eager to develop strategies that adopt humanism and relationship as their slogan. This characteristic, to give feelings of connection with friends, families, or others is as important as the service of the technology itself, and might be even more important than that. For example, mobile phone is not just a machine that provides convenience, but an emotional linkage to the other people. Undoubtedly, this is applicable to almost every culture in the world, but special mobile phone programs which are popular in Korea, like providing discounted fee on calls between family members or close friends represent that the importance of togetherness in this country, even in the technology related issues.       

Another similar example is found on the internet. In Korea, almost all the people have their own ‘minihompi’ (mini-homepage), kind of an internet blog. But the one significant difference with another countries’ blog culture is that it adopted the concept of family system. Users are able to make family relationships each other and their blogs are linked, so sharing feeling and thought is easier than with non-family members. It makes the huge relationship network in online, and people care each other and feel the connection by visiting family member’s blogs. This web system had an extraordinary success in Korea, and even many of the older people over 40, 50 years old are using this blog system as much as young people. It can be said that the main reason of this huge success is that they understood exactly what Korean people wanted online, traditional culture of relationship.  

Some people say that there are no more traditions in Korea now, and rapid westernisation is making the country to lose its originality. It is true that lots of people’s life style is different from the traditional way, and sometimes there are social problems due to this fact. But I know for sure that I can say, Korea does have its own feature of harmony, making the balance between old humanism and new technology. Although sometimes it seems to be chaotic, this chaos itself is the peculiarity of today of Korea, and maybe, I hope, the potential power of this country. See the pictures above again. Don’t you think they are making weird, but interesting symbiosis now?