Some thoughts on Sze Hui's paper and the Internet

I found Sze Hui's paper extremely interesting. Two aspects I am especially interested are is the PC bang and gaming addiction.

My previous ideas of cybercafes were dark, sketchy places like the one I saw in China many summers ago. It was completely dark from the outside and you couldn't see inside with the exception of two lights and smelled of cigarette smoke. Therefore I found it interesting to see that the cybercafes can be a valid and much utilized social arena in Korea. The comment about a place to meet for dates was really interesting...how people who meet online can meet in person at the love seats in the PC bangs... Also interesting is how groups of friends would just go hang out there, and play online games together which brings me to the second aspect of the article I found interesting which was gaming addiction.

Gaming addiction is not just a problem in Korea but perhaps all over the world. Whenever I watch the Chinese news there always seem to be an article or report about parents worrying about their kids who are literally living at cybercafes gaming all the time. The anecdote about the person who died from gaming in the paper was one that I actually heard before and one used by my parents to prevent my little brother from gaming too much.

In addition, I have some comments about the internet in general. The internet seems to be a great way to get products of Asian (Japan, Korea, China and Taiwan) popular culture products. For Korean dramas with Chinese subs and other chinese language material http://bt.btchina.net is hard to beat. For Korean dramas in english http://www.d-addicts.com/forum/ is really good. Both of the above use Bittorrent, personally, I like to use the Utorrent Client (http://utorrent.com/) for english torrents and Bitcomet (http://www.bitcomet.com) for Chinese torrents. And for really rare stuff emule is really good.

Finally, let's talk about some recent sites and services that I liked relating to Korean pop culture. One interesting Korean service I found recently is clubbox which is like an online FTP. Though its totally in Korean the speeds are relatively nice at 52k and I use it to download Korean dramas. Also interesting is the website is the Soompi Forums (http://www.soompi.com/forums/) which has threads topics on Korean music, drama, and movies in English which I am also using for my paper because sometimes they translate excerpts about a drama from Korean news.