Smartphones and Idiot Boxes

A foreigner who has been on the New York Subway or London Underground may find the Seoul Metro a pleasant surprise. First, it is clean and relatively odourless. Second, with the recent introduction of screen doors, the platforms are near silent. And third, cell phone reception remains as crisp within the underground carriages as aboveground on buses.
With the widespread use of smartphones, this means that Koreans can do much more than just talk while roaming the deep conduits of Seoul’s underbelly. They can engage in a whole array of tasks on the Internet, such as checking their e-mails and ‘homepages’, searching for nearby cafes and restaurants, or updating themselves with the latest global news and stock market developments.

Apple iPhone 4

According to the OECD, Korea has the highest rate of households with broadband access in the world (as of July 2010). It is a staggering 95.9 percent, including broadband access through cell phones. More astonishingly, it has maintained this top spot for several years in a row. With fourth-generation (4G) phones now intensifying the competition between foreign and domestic smartphone makers in the Korean telecommunications market, what is for certain is that more Koreans will come to possess ubiquitous ‘smart (phone) power’ in the palm of their hands.
But are smartphones making Koreans smarter? A cursory glance, unfortunately, suggests ‘no’. More often than not, people on the Metro are found using smartphones to watch ‘idiot boxes’—a Western euphemism to mean the television. In the tightest of spaces, people still up-hold their smartphone like a beacon of hope, only to scrutinize a recent episode of a comedy or entertainment show with an absent-minded laugh. Otherwise, people are found playing petty computer games, reading comics, or watching a Hollywood movie on a 1.5x3 inch (38x76 mm) monitor. I am cringing at the thought that foreigners, like me, would laugh at the sight.
The issue, however, is not whether or not we foreigners would be judgmental of Koreans. It is neither whether Koreans have the right to relieve themselves from work-related stress through phones. The issue is that the (ab)use of smartphones seems to come at the detriment of reading. According to the NOP World Culture Score Index survey, Korea was found to have the lowest adult reading time among 30 countries, including OECD countries. It was a mere 3.1 hours a week. Although this statistic is from a few years back, according to the Korean Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism, the average weekly reading time of Korean adults in 2009 only amounted to 3.3 hours. The concern here is that to me less people seem to be reading on the Metro than a few years ago because of smartphones. If so, the hope is that Koreans are making up for this lost time by reading elsewhere.
One way out of this conundrum may by the wider use of tablet PC—the large-screen version of smartphones, originally developed to compete with e-readers, such as the Kindle. In this way, Koreans can read e-books on the Metro without the hassle of having to heave around hardcopies. But to date, despite the widespread use of smart phones, tablet PC and e-readers have not caught on in Korea. Is this a symptom or cause of low levels of reading felt on the Metro? The few such devices I did spot were being used to read comics!
Korea has proclaimed itself a global IT powerhouse. Korean companies are household names in the global cell phone market. Together with one of the best Metro systems on the planet, the G20 summit held in Seoul last November is a good opportunity to reflect on what these hard-earned status-markers really mean to Koreans.

Giorgio Olivotto
Seoul, Korea
March 20, 2011