technology. The latter is a big deal in Korea, the most wired country
in the world. More than 90 percent of homes here have high-speed
Internet access. As of 2013, the country had the fastest download
speeds in the world, 40 percent faster than the number-two country,
Japan, and six times faster than the world average. Video gaming is so
big that it’s a spectator sport, filling huge stadiums with fans
watching sallow contenders push buttons on consoles.
In 2010 a young South Korean man collapsed and died after
playing fifty straight hours of StarCraft, prompting the government to
ban some games between midnight and 6 A.M. for anyone under
sixteen. According to the National Information Society Agency, 8
percent of Koreans under age forty suffer from gaming addiction,
with the figure rising to 14 percent for kids between the ages of nine
and twelve. The government earmarked billions of won for counseling
and education about the dangers of too much time on screens. These
include poor grades, compromised sleep and family strife. Adults,
meanwhile, evince slightly different symptoms. A survey of 500
office workers claimed their cellphones caused slouchy posture (32.7
percent), vision deterioration (32.5 percent) and finger pain (18.8
percent). The term “addiction” is controversial, but there are
questionnaires to help identify distressing signs. Keeling over dead is
a tip-off.
Perhaps it’s inevitable that digital detox would find its way into
the country’s parks and forests. Nobody is happier to see it there than
Kim Jooyoun. Like Park, she is one of the new healing instructors
trained by the Korean Forest Agency. A mother herself, she
understands the pressures on young Koreans and their striving
families. Some years back, when her own daughter was fourteen, Kim
found her literally pulling her hair out from stress. “Ever since then,”
she told me, “the child comes first.” On Saturdays, Kim teaches a
digital detox program for preteens in one of Seoul’s big parks,
Bukhansan. I visited on a glorious fall day, when hundreds of Koreans