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MEANWHILE, when everyone is online: The Darker Side of South Korea's Social Media Culture

In my previous post, I wrote about Germany’s surprisingly restrained approach to social media. Although 93% of German adults use the internet, only 51% use social media. South Korea presents an almost opposite picture: 99% of adults use the internet, and 80% use social media. As a Korean, this difference feels very real. In Korea, being online is not just a tool for finding information. It is closely connected to entertainment, relationships, trends, beauty standards, and even personal identity. Of course, this hyperconnected environment has many benefits. Social media allows people to exchange information quickly, organize communities, discover creative work, and participate in public conversations. However, it also means that unhealthy ideas can spread, evolve, and become normalized just as quickly. Bruns (2008) describes online users as “produsers” who do not merely consume content but continually create, modify, and circulate it. Unfortunately, this collaborative process does not g...
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Digital Restraint : Exploring the unique social media gap in Germany

 When we think of Germany, “technologically behind” is probably not the first phrase that comes to mind.  Germany is known for engineering, innovation, and a highly developed economy. Yet its social media habits reveal a surprisingly different story. According to Gramlich (2024), 93% of German adults use the internet, but only 51% use social media. That is a 42-percentage-point gap—the largest among all countries included in Pew Research Center’s recent survey. In other words, Germans are clearly online. They just do not seem especially interested in spending that online time posting, sharing, liking, or scrolling through social media. This becomes even more interesting when Germany is compared with its European neighbors. Countries such as Belgium, France, Spain, Sweden, and the United Kingdom have similarly high internet-use rates, but around two-thirds or more of their adults use social media. Germany therefore does not simply follow the broader Western European pattern. Th...
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A Small Defense of Hashtags

This week, I kept thinking about the different types of knowledge discussed in Zgheib and Dabbagh’s (2020) article on Social Media Learning Activities: factual, conceptual, procedural, and metacognitive knowledge. Some of them were easy to understand. Procedural knowledge appeared when students created something, such as a blog, podcast, or infographic. That made sense to me because making a final product requires students to learn not only the content, but also the process of organizing ideas, using tools, and producing something shareable. Metacognitive knowledge also felt familiar. When I write a blog post, I first think about what I learned from the readings, connect it to what I already know, and then try to synthesize everything in my own words. Even revising my post makes me ask, “Is this really what I mean?” That process feels very metacognitive. But the most interesting part for me was conceptual knowledge. Zgheib and Dabbagh noted that conceptual knowledge can be promoted thr...
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From Submit Button to Public Blogging

This week, I kept thinking about how our course itself is using Web 2.0. In one of the readings, Zgheib and Dabbagh (2020) discuss an interesting problem: even when instructors use social media or Web 2.0 tools, the activity does not always become truly “social.” Sometimes the tool is used almost like a regular LMS. The instructor posts materials, students submit something, and the interaction still mostly goes in one direction: from instructor to student. That made me think about our class blog. Technically, our professor, Vanessa could have used Canvas in a very simple way: upload the readings, post weekly prompts, collect assignments, and maybe leave grades or comments. That would still be online learning, but it would not necessarily create much student-to-student interaction. Instead, our course uses public blogging. We write our thoughts where classmates can see them. We read each other’s posts. We leave comments. Sometimes we notice that someone interpreted the same reading in a...
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Saved, Liked, and Still Not Exercised

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In my previous post, I wrote about my Instagram saved list, which is made up of 65% recipes and 20% new restaurants. So what about the remaining 15%? 5% is life hacks, and 10% is workout routines. This post is about the kind of treasure I found, carefully buried, and then never allowed to see the light of day. Yes, I am talking about workout routines that I only saved. Recently, a singer I love, who had gone through a long and difficult time with depression and binge eating disorder, returned in a healthy and joyful way. She released a new album with her brother, and then posted a 30-minute aerobic workout video using one of the album’s songs as the background music. I left a comment saying, “I clicked because Suhyun’s smile was so pretty. I’ll do the workout next time.” Within two days, the comment received 650 likes. That probably means many people related to it, right? My networked knowledge ecosystem may have stopped at the stage of collecting, but through all those likes, I defin...
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From Saved Recipes to Shared Dinners

There is a saying I once heard: “If someone asks you, ‘Why go that far?’ then that is probably your thing.” After hearing that, I started wondering what I personally “go that far” or " being extra "  for. I think, for me, it is cooking. Technically, I could just make something simple with whatever happens to be in my fridge. But if I suddenly decide that I want to make an apple, Brie, and arugula sandwich, I am absolutely the kind of person who needs to run to grocery to have every single ingredient. Some of my friends find cooking annoying. One type of friend says it feels like a waste of time to spend thirty minutes cooking something that will be eaten in ten. Another says they honestly do not care much about taste, so as long as something goes into their mouth, they are fine eating whatever is available. But I think about cooking very differently. To me, cooking is a full cycle of happiness: finding the freshest seasonal ingredients, spending 15 to 30 minutes making somet...
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The Risotto was Innocent: How a Hinge Date Lost to Google.

 This week's readings got me thinking about privacy online, but honestly, they mainly reminded me of one story. 
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