As part of my rewiring exercise, I went to the application I use most frequently throughout the day – Instagram.
Every time I get the chance, I find myself refreshing my Instagram feed and going on the Explore page to see watch videos that have by this time become very tailored to what I’m interested in. A lot of these tend to be about Kpop, like official music videos, choreography covers, live performances of Kpop idols, etc. I’ve always enjoyed watching them but had a different thought after reading Zuckerman’s book and reflecting on the kind of information I’m getting from all these videos. They are for entertainment but in no way inform me about what’s going on around the world or the bigger complexities involved in this Kpop industry.
One real-world issue that arises from such a appearance-centred, image-building industry is the unrealistic expectations we as the audience start forming about these entertainers, and projecting them later onto the Korean population in general. The media portrays a lot of girls in Kpop to be cute and innocent – from their makeup and outfit to music video concepts and dance choreographies.
Recently, a famous female singer called IU released a song called “Bibi” that addresses these unrealistic expectations of women in the industry and she goes onto counteract them in the music video by refusing to smile. This song highlights the huge feminist movement that is happening in South Korea right now, following the Me Too movement that shed light on numerous assault and harassment cases with high profile celebrities. With this as my basis for trying to get in touch with deeper concerns existing in the Kpop industry, I tried to rewire my Instagram feed so that I would see more of these enlightening videos/pictures instead of generic Kpop.
I tried to do this by searching for specific posts/videos/pictures such as the #metoomovement. From my experience, using the search function and clicking on/viewing similar posts have shaped what I see on my Instagram Explore page. So I went ahead and tried to look for these posts whenever I was tempted to go on Instagram.
In the process, I learnt that it was important to find the right tags to see the posts I’m looking for. Since I wanted to look at gender dynamics in Korea, I searched for #koreanfeminism, #feminisminkorea, #metookorea, etc., none of which had a lot of results (all under ten posts). Then it hit me that the Koreans posting about these topics would be using Korean instead, so I typed them again in Korean and the word #feminism in Korean already gave me 81.1K posts, including personal accounts, comics and news reports.
It was interesting to scroll through the posts under this specific tag and I was immediately made aware of the latest local and international stories regarding feminism and #metoo movements. My initial aim was to see this kind of posts start populating my Instagram feed without me having to search for them. As of today, even after doing this for over a day, there hasn’t been much change to my overall feed, but I trust that it will happen as time passes. What’s important is that even just beginning to think about the deeper social and cultural dialogues that might be taking place in an area I’m interested in has made me more aware of what is really going on in my country and my people’s stance on various issues.
Social media platforms like Instagram have definitely proved to be a great source of entertainment, but this exercise shows that there’s more we can get out of this digital space and using it more meaningfully. As Zuckerman puts it, we need to “understand how we’re connected and disconnected” by staying aware of our interactions online.