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PaperclipPerfector  3mo ago (text post)   3829 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for August 18, 2024

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Being "on one's phone" seems to be a fairly universal pastime these days.

Have you observed any cultural differences in what different types of people do on their phones? Like if you considered young vs. old, black vs. white vs. Asian vs. Hispanic, poor vs. middle-class vs. upper-class - who uses what apps? What activity are they actually spending their time on the phone doing?

Young people seem to universally be on TikTok. Old people on Facebook.

Then there’s my girlfriend, who watches TikTok ripoffs like Instagram reels and YouTube shorts. But then again, she identifies as a granny in a young woman’s body.

Personally, I'm usually on instagram, twitter, substack, reddit, or reading a book on my phone. I think most of my friends are usually on reddit or instagram. Reddit is still more male coded but I have a vague sense it's become more gender neutral over the years.

Reddit is still more male coded but I have a vague sense it's become more gender neutral over the years.

It looks like it's 62-38. That does seem to be lower than in the past, after looking it up.

Interestingly there are a handful of subreddits like arr FauxMoi that can be quite large(3 mil subs!) that I get the impression are overwhelmingly female.

That's the only one that I've actually heard of an irl woman in my irl social circles actively using and reading routinely, but there are presumably others. Makeup subs and subs for certain varieties of reality TV are probably also big ones.

And then based on what's been happening over at rdrama lately, the redscarepod subs are at least somewhat comprised of women (female).

”Serious” phone gaming is popular among poor populations and regions but less common among the middle class+ in America. Caribbean / Central Americans / South Americans play games like PUGB Mobile and CODM which have voice chat, cosmetics, clans, etc. I can confirm this is popular among: expatriat Albanians who all play with each other while living in different countries; Lakotas on reservations; Jamaicans, Guyanese, Trinidadians; Venezuelans; all of the above who have moved to America. There is nothing weird about this to them in the way it would be for a rich white American kid to forego PC gaming and console gaming. Genders are more mixed.

Yeah, mobile gaming in the US is typically either puzzle/distraction stuff like Wordle and Sudoku or GenX/Boomers addicted to Candy Crush. In a lot of the developing world, consoles don’t exist and PCs are only for work.

In Japan these are the things I have seen on people's phones, keeping in mind that it's rude to observe other people's phone screens, that there are little sheets you can put on your phone to prevent anyone viewing it at an angle, and that I prefer when possible to avoid being rude. These are in no particular order of frequency.

  1. Inane games. Battle games with little armies. Dragonball games where you wail on a computer opponent and then it wails on you. Candy Crush. That watermelon game that is similar to Tetris, probably. Other assorted time-sink mind-killing games.

  2. LINE. That's like Whatsapp ot whatever it is you use wherever country you are. Females tend to have hundreds of unread message indicators. The most I have seen is 127 unread messages. Reading and texting, often with long nails in a way I think I could not do.

  3. News sites with printed text.

  4. Either Instagram or whatever shows little reels (TikTok and YouTube now also do this so I don't know.) Lots of swiping, smiling, expressionless gazing, swiping, swiping, swiping.

  5. Twitter/X. It's still pretty big here I think. There was a recent kerfuffle about an Olympian (an athlete, not a god), I think an archer but maybe not, who suffered a bit of online bullying. Online bullying is a touchy subject here since the high profile suicide a few years ago of a television actress/talent who was sub tweeted relentlessly due to her performance on a reality show. You may know more about this than I do.

  6. Music Spotify maybe People gaze blankly with earbuds in in a way that must keep Ray Bradbury spinning perpetually in his grave. They pause occasionally to adjust volume or fast fwd. Or whatever.

  7. Cooking/recipe stuff. This may be specialized reels (see above). I do see lots of how-to cooking vids being viewed.

  8. Rarely, sports. The people who do this are usually older, probably retired men who don't GAF and sometimes watch with the volume on. This is annoying. It's almost always baseball. If it's a young guy it will be soccer and through earbuds. I have never seen anyone watching sumo on their phone.

  9. Dramas of some type. These days Korean dramas are big. In the old days Hollywood movies were much-beloved. Tom Cruise and maybe Tom Hiddleston (called Tomuhi here) may still stir the loins of some Japanese women, but these days the Koreans have definitely gained ascension in the movie/drama category.

  10. Delivery Health sites. Translation, Call Girls. They will be laid out in a grid for you to choose which girl you want. Admittedly I have only seen two guys on their phones doing this, perhaps on their way to some paid assignation.

I did ten but I could probably write more. Anyway that's Japan. And as I say I don't look very often, truly. I make it a point not to. But sometimes the trains are congested to an improbable degree and one sees.

And yes all very anecdotal.

Edit: All of this on public trains/buses fwiw

Haha, the Japanese woman I watch for immersion practice is learning Korean precisely for K-dramas. What's up with that? What's good about K-dramas? Do you know of any good ones? Are there a lot of Japanese who are super into K-pop like there are in America?

I cannot say why they are popular but I suspect one reason they must be more popular than, say, Japanese dramas, of which there are many, is that as perhaps saccharine and sentimental the K dramas are, they are better acted, scripted, and directed, and have higher production values, than their Japanese equivalents.

Japanese dramas (with few exceptions), possibly never meant to cross the ocean to international viewers, are in my view not only vapid and wooden (cast, as they are, by domestically popular "talent-o" with no discernible talent in addition to career actors) but directed as if the viewers are subliterate cretins. Any emotional scene is cut so that you may clearly see the reaction of each actor (in case you are unsure how you are supposed to feel) subtlety is abandoned for over-the-top hysterics. The Japanese films that exhibit some degree of artistry and which make waves internationally (such as the Academy-award-winning Drive My Car in 2021) go relatively unseen in Japan (until they win an award). Think of the criticism of Marvel. Then take away the effects, the experience of the actors, the multicultural nods in terms of casting, any attempt at realism, and the humor. Then add back in hamfisted direction, overreacting by everyone (in ways that are the polar opposite of how the regular person would actually behave in Japan) a soundtrack seemingly composed for a children's show, a plot scripted so predictably that after the first ten minutes this same child-viewer could accurately write the outcome, and you've got the typical Japanese drama.

Korean dramas offer generally more complexity, even if it's just a love triangle. Having written out all that I really don't know what the deal is. They're mostly romances, if that is a clue. And populated by quite beautiful actors, though you suspect that if you were to actually meet any of them in real life they would seem oddly unreal, like a walking AI generated beautiful asian person. This is I suspect due to extensive cosmetic surgery. I see lots of Korean tourists regularly trying to achieve this same look but I suspect they have less-talented surgeons.)

Kpop is popular here, yes. Where once One Direction drove flocks of adolescent girls into NOVA English language schools, the present generation studies Hangul and holidays in Seoul and comes back disappointed with Korean toilets. I cannot keep up with which group is who and there always seem to be new ones.There was a thread about them here a while back.

(As an aside, I sat through the much-lauded Drive My Car on a plane once and at more than one point felt an almost physical boredom. And I do not bore easily. Maybe it was the long haul flight.)

Out of curiosity, have you discussed your opinion of Japanese dramas with local friends? I can't stand ドラマ either, and I don't know if it's because I have Westernised tastes that dramas offend (but anime doesn't somehow) or because Japanese drama is legitimately that bad. I lean towards the latter.

My wife used to enjoy watching Japanese dramas back in the day, then after having kids sort of didn't have time, but now watches Korean dramas. If she enjoys them I would feel pretty ungallant shitting on them for what well may be cultural biases. I have often heard Japanese people say they prefer Western media because Japanese media is so bad, but these have usually been bilinguals who like English so who knows what's going on there.

Sad to hear that about Japanese dramas, I had hoped it would be a better paradigm than America's film industry with horrible writing and ridiculous plots. I know I like their pop music a lot better than ours.

All just my opinion. In general the films are better than the television dramas. I don't find the US film industry so bad separate the pandering to progressive mores. But then I don't see that many new releases and very rarely any streaming originals

the Japanese woman I watch for immersion practice

What is this? Watch?

I'm attempting to learn Japanese, and something to do while learning any language is to just sit there and listen to a native talk and try to make sense of it. Since I'm still a beginner I use the Comprehensible Japanese channel/site. That's the one I "watch".

Is she cute?

Pretty cute if you ask me, especially for someone in their late 30s. https://youtube.com/watch?v=NebtveWRFGM?si=r1c-ZxR98Olf3Y5V

I was once sat in a cafe buried in alacritty terminals and neovim sessions. White tattooed hipster type sits next to me, and from what I could see peripherally he must have spent an hour rearranging icons on his home screen and mindlessly scrolling through some kind of picture-based social media, the "10 words per screenful" kind.

I suppose there is a reason this type pulls shots and pours pints instead of learning a command-line and how to sling code. Words and literacy are too difficult, just hunt and peck pictures with your thumbs.

cafe buried in alacritty terminals and neovim sessions.

Was this you, or the cafe decoration like some kind of cyberpunk cybercafe?

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