Images of Leisure

 Along with killer barbeque and delicious noodles, Seoul’s menu always includes food for thought. In just the last week and a half, I have juggled questions and theories that I had never truly considered before. Many of the questions I ask myself come with visiting any new place, such as topics of etiquette, history, or the local politics (which I enjoy exploring wherever I am). But in the hyper-modern city of Seoul, where the economy is skyrocketing and from which K-Pop is blaring Korean values across the globe, these questions develop a sense of urgency. This metropolis is a kind of sneak-peak into tomorrow, into the future. After all, where else but the future could you find Wifi on the subway? The topics I try to investigate may well be topics that we will all find ourselves confronting in the coming years.

            If I am to try and identity the facets this Brave New World, I cannot do it alone. My observations will be coupled with research into sociological theories, the materials that my various classes will provide me, and whatever else I can lay my hands on. Today’s post is inspired largely by Guy Debord’s 1967 book The Society of the Spectacle. In Spectacle, DeBord lays out his theory that image has replaced our relations with other humans. Through advertising and manipulation, Mass Media implants a set of desires within us, much it centered around the question of “What do you want others to see you as?” This obsession with our image becomes so consuming that we do not relate with another person, but with their image, which we compare to our own. There’s much more to this work than just that point, and my above summary is probably not the best that you will find out there. But I think it is sufficient enough that it will carry us to the banks of the Han River, located in downtown Seoul.

            As any Korean will tell you, Seoul is not one city, but actually two, which are each located on either side of the Han River. Seoul is a massive city, and I’ve only seen small pieces of it, but I was glad to make the trek down to this divide of the two cities this weekend. It’s a beautiful area, and on this particular Saturday, the banks were filled with young people enjoying picnics, listening to music, and zooming along the river-walk on electric scoters. And of course, no millennial’s leisure is complete without the pictures to prove that it happened.

            There is an excess of smartphones in Seoul. While there’s much of this city that I haven’t seen yet, and most of the people I spend time with are young folks, it still seems like everybody has one. I even bought one this week, and it has not been an entirely comfortable transition. Texting and calling is more than enough for my lifestyle. But Seoul almost seems to demand an update of me. Take transportation, for example. Before boarding the Wifi-providing train car and watching Netflix on your commute, you can download the public transit app and use it to receive real-time updates on when your bus will arrive and what traffic will be like on the way there. Vendors in the subway stations sell phone cases and accessories, as if you couldn’t be caught dead in the subway without the full package of the smartphone experience. Samsung is a huge industry here, not just in the abstract sense of economic development, but with tangible influences on the culture.

            This smartphone excess followed me and my friends out of the subway and onto the Han River. One of my friends is a photographer, and he informed us that we had arrived at “the Golden Hour,” that special time just before the sunset, when the sun gives a golden hue to any picture you take. I suspect the Koreans around us couldn’t have cared less whether it was the Golden Hour; they would still be taking constant snapshots of their activities. The Han River is a great place for photos, with shrub sculptures in the park, the river beneath you, and the Seoul skyline behind you. But if your taking photos at a place, are you truly there? Was anyone truly at the Han River this afternoon, or simply waiting until they could return home and share the photos of what they did?

            Debord had reared his head and soured my afternoon. But in the midst of these thoughts, I found a beautiful moment. On the edge of the river-walk, two high school students had taken flyers that were being handed out throughout the park and folded them into paper airplanes. I watched for maybe a minute as they tried to see which one they could throw farther. No one was filming it, or sharing it, or live tweeting it. There was a beautiful spontaneity to it, collecting advertisements (a medium that creates so much of our obsession with image) and remaking them into a whimsical afternoon diversion. Just what everybody looks for when they stroll down to the river on a Saturday afternoon.