> The younger generation seems to be dealing with the rampant consumption and materialism, and the emptiness that results, by embracing the cute.
This resonates. Didn't realize it until now though.
This resonates. Didn't realize it until now though.
LINE was the first messenger app to roll out stickers. Those stickers, mostly cartoons, do a vastly better job of encapsulating expression, especially online, than GIFs, Emojis, and Emoticons do.
Stickers are commonplace messages in Korea. Stickers in America, on the other hand, have not caught on. If I had to speculate, it is because the art is shallow, soulless, and an commercial grab.
From Arnade's piece:
> If you make anything and everything a lovable character, that dampens the edges. Makes a life of buying and selling stuff a little less dreary. A little less pointless.
You could say the same for every culture. If you talk to Koreans, they cannot fathom America's addiction to hyperbole, whether it be in everyday conversation or in advertising.
Examples:
"That was an amazing meal."
"It was to die for."
"Absolutely."
"You are the best!"
"What a killer deal!"
Now let's transform Arnade's original observation:
> If you make anything and everything a hyperbole – "perfect" or "the best" – that dampens the edges. Makes a life of buying and selling stuff a little less dreary. A little less pointless.
It fits, no? Would I describe American hyperbole as cope? No, it's merely how we encode emotions into language. Cartoons are the same for Koreans.
Edit: I'd like to proffer a different reason for their prevalence: many cartoons are government-sponsored and are ways for the government to signal that they are welcoming to children as a response to the declining birth rate. You could interpret this dystopically – I just see it as cute.
Take the Jongro logo, for instance. Here’s its origin:
> It was developed and donated free of charge by the Environmental Design Research Institute of Kookmin University in 2001; through opinion surveys and expert advice, it was born in a friendly, resident-centered form that cannot be found in other local governments.
How in any way could you ascribe it’s existence to a deep emptiness?
Postwar Japan has done a lot of preparation for natural disasters but has had essentially no civil defense measures against military threats. That might be changing, though. Just a couple of weeks ago, for the first time, the city of Tokyo designated 105 subway stations as emergency evacuation sites in case of missile attacks [1, in Japanese]. This was prompted not only by the continued threat from North Korea but also by what has been happening in Ukraine.
[1] https://news.yahoo.co.jp/articles/34fd48f39ee9b8a78197f350e8...
I am tempted to speculate that the average Japanese civilian is more worried about the threat of North Korea than the average Korean civilian.
They have exactly that threat from North Korea. But I suspect that the culture of "rampant consumerism and materialism" is part of how they deal with that (also the cuteness thing he mentions possibly plays a part)
Cuteness out of emptiness you feel inside is also for me fall short. My reading(armchair psychology, yes. But as a Korean who thought about this a lot) is that this is more to do with patriarchal culture where man and woman appeals there take-careablity(woman: man would want to take care of me/man: I could be a good protector). In confucious culture there's lot of emphasis on who takes care of whom and familial analogy is applied to every relationships.
I guess I didn't read it as him saying "the young are more materialistic" but more as "the young are dealing with the fallout of a culture of rampant consumption and materialism". The young are generally too young to have built the culture of rampant consumption and materialism, but it's all they've known.
https://web.archive.org/web/20210820145247/https://sittingon...
> “monotonous ruins of a nation-state… perfectly realized in the name of capitalism.”
> Urban isolation and rapidly advancing technology have helped erode reality in favor of representation. Connection with real human beings becomes less desirable; cartoon characters to which you will never be held accountable become ideal friends.
> a cartoon dog, soft and cuddly, with no blood, no fragile network of organs, no accountability and no ability to hold others accountable.