Thursday, January 28, 2010

Rule of Thumb: Koreans Reign in Texting World

Ha Mok-min and Bae Yeong-ho are now popularly know as part of the "thumb tribe" in South Korea because of text messaging. Both of them have won text messaging contest over the past 2 years. In 2008, Bae was the champion, typing 8 characters per second, and Ha was the champion, typing 7.25 characters per second. Author, Choe Sang-Hun, explains that the contest are held in New York City and the winners receive $50,000 in prize money. 13 countries intake in the contest which makes 6 million contestant compete. Ha's mother takes great pride in her daughters accomplishment because she hopes it will help her with college admissions as an engineer major.
I find it amazing how similar yet different cultures can be. What both countries have in common it the attachments to the phone. People send out as of much of 500 messages a day. Text messaging has become such a big problem, it's hard to have the complete attention of another because they are always involved in conversation and the severity of texting and driving it the same penalty of drunk driving. The biggest shock to me is how the cultures react to text messaging. Here in America, parents take phones away as punishment and it s a big deal to not be able to text a friend and parents want to "throw the phone trough the wall" because it drives them that crazy. In South Korea though, the reaction is a little different. Parents are proud of their child's ability to text so fast. They see it as an intelligent factor to be able to hold conversation and text at the same time. I've always known that text messaging was a popular thing but never knew that a parent could actually be proud of that.

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