Did I mention I am home? I probably did in that Bernard Werber post. I am home in South Korea for the Summer, and this is a different world from America. (But America is different from everyone else, anyway.)
One of the differences I didn't realize before is that popular culture is pretty much uniform throughout the country here. The market for anything is far smaller here than in America. The broadcasting business, for example, has virtually three to six channels that broadcast their own shows. And by "shows", I mean programs other than news, which include soap operas, "variety" shows, and talk shoows. The other one hundred and eighty-seven channels either are movie channels or import Japanese shows (of the same level of crappiness as domestic shows) or the entity of E! and Sex and the City.
But however, as I'm most likely not going to criticize my own homeland so severely, there are funny little things that happen with the small range of cultural experience. One thing that was exceptionally amusing lately was that a community named "Voldemort" kept being referenced as I spent some time in a forum. Naturally, I thought it was some kind of diehard Harry Potter fan club and became increasingly interested as I am a diehard Harry Potter fan myself. It was nevertheless bizarre that this Voldemort club was constantly mentioned because the forum itself was a fashion forum. Then some curious person questioned the identity of Voldemort. And, as it turns out, it was a makeup forum! For some reason I do not understand, the makeup forum was supposed to be this huge one-hundred-thousand-user forum/secret organization and the members were forbidden to speak the name of the forum outside it. So they called it Voldemort since that's He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named. I sincerely swear that I am not making this up.
The Lord of the Rings have almost the same degree of fame, with words like "elf", "ork", and "hobbit" commonly used in everyday conversations. A guy would, for example, see a modelesque girl walk down the street and say to his friend, "look, an elf!" Or a five-foot-tall girl would complain about a crowded subway train and say "I hate being such a hobbit." You get the idea. It would actually be quite interesting to know more about this kind of phenomena academically, but I have no idea which field of study this is going to be in.
