스마트 아줌마 Smart Ajumma

My mum is now a big fan of Youtube. She used to be one of Korean drama fans like other ajummas in Korea or even in the world. One day in last year, she asked me how to ‘watch’ the video that one of her friends sent to my mum via Kakao Talk. I taught her how to ‘touch’ that link and ‘watch’ those videos on Youtube on her smartphone. She brought earphones and grab her smartphone to watch that video on Youtube. That was her first experience of watching TV on her mobile not on TV in our living room.

After that day, she seems to enjoying new ways of watching TV on Youtube. Whenever she came back home she put earphones on her ears and started watching videos sent from her friends. The genres of videos are tremendous. From her friends’ grandchildren’s videos to some serious political issues as well. In my opinion, her favourite genre is pretty much about political issues and some traveling video logs. So now, she rarely watch the TV in our living room even though there are Korean dramas every night on TV.

She said that she and her fiends enjoy watching Youtube on their smartphones because they can ‘choose’ the channel what they want to ‘watch’ without barriers of time and space. Also she mentioned about her own space while she’s watching her chosen Youtube channel on her smartphone. (I found that is very interesting because I also feel like I’m in my own space whenever I watch my subscribed Youtube channel by myself) Indeed, watching those Youtube videos are sorta big trend among my mum’s fiends (and her age group, ajummas). They now share good, useful or hot issued videos through Kakao Talk’s group chat room and they’re talking about those videos when they meet at offline spaces. (from online to offline and come back to online again, it is a looping communication process I already mentioned in my thesis).

Furthermore, my mum has her favourite Youtube BJ (ajumma BJ) and she said that BJ is very famous among ajummas. (I’m watching Youtube almost everyday but I never heard about that BJ before. So I realised that the world of sns such as Youtube is amazingly big to know every single channels and their BJS because of its characteristic reason. Everyone’s needs are becoming various and wider so the small channels (niche channels) are becoming bigger and deeper I think. For this reason, there are famous ajumma BJs on Youtube but I’ve never heard about them at all. And vice versa.

These days, I feel like I’ve reached my limit on this Ajumma research because there’re so much funky and something useful/informational research around me. I am kind of losing my confidence to keep doing this research about ajummas. So I didn’t do much working, studying and writing recently. But, I changed my mind and I will do something very exciting research about ajummas. Maybe my research isn’t that necessary to change this world or to impress others on the conferences, etc. I truly don’t care about others. I love my research and I will keep doing my research and writing even though my English writing isn’t that good enough compared with other ‘native’ writers/speakers. I will keep working hard and at the same time I will enjoy my life as an ajumma expert, like my mum started learning something very new and enjoying those new things.

Today, I went out for having lunch with my mum near my house. One of my mum’s friends sent a Kakao Talk message to my mum and she wanted to join us to have coffee together. So we did. We ordered good coffee and tea cookies. She (my mum’s friend) started talking about her grand children so any other grandmothers do. Her grand daughter became 6 this year so her daughter-in-law is now looking for the pre-school for her daughter. My mum’s friend talked about Yeong-Yu (Yeong eh Yu Chi One which means English speaking kindergarten. In these types of kindergarten, the students are only allowed to speak in English during the classes, so their parents believe that it should be very good opportunity to learn English since early years. So the entrance competition rate for these kindergartens is getting extremely selective even though the tuition fee is high compared with normal public kindergartens.

So this afternoon, I heard so much information about those special (or different) kindergartens/ preschool and elementary school from my mum’s friend. (And I don’t need those information at all because I don’t need it) After having those uncomfortable tea time with bunch of information about pre-school, I came back home and found some communities of younger mums who are interested in their children’s education. (Yes, education fever is still HOT)

Here is a very useful and interesting online website for ‘moms’. Its name is ‘Gang Nam Um-ma’ (Gang nam mothers). And they uploaded and shared useful information about schools, kindergartens, Hak-Wons (private educational institutions) on the website. I think moms (mothers, and I defined them as younger version of ajummas) also have very unique culture of their own like ajummas, so I will do some research about these moms in Korea very soon.

Have you ever heard about TDC in Japan? They’re dance club in Japan that are consist of high school girls. Their dance is amazing and I found this YouTube video that I’ve attached below, and their looking (costumes and permed hair) is very similar to typical stereotyped images of ajummas that most media (TV dramas for example) describes. Of course they didn’t imitate ajumma. But I just wanted to share this video of TDC because their dance is amazing and also they’re presenting the unique culture of certain era through their costumes, music and dancing. I really like their performance and I hope our beautiful ajummas  will be reflected as the unique group that people can enjoy their uniqueness through various types of interpretation and understanding.

 

 

‘Motherism: A prejudice which leads stay-at-home mothers to be viewed as stupid, lazy and unattractive … He came out this week in defence of the stay-at-home mother, telling a conference that motherism should be tackled in the same vein as racism is.’ <https://www.macmillandictionary.com/buzzword/entries/motherism>

 

If there’s motherism, I can say there’s ajummaism in Korea. Full time parenting mothers do work at home and this could be equivalent to mothers who work outside of home! I should read more about this ‘motherism’ because I haven’t done enough research about this -ism yet so I can’t say about this in the concrete. But I can tell from this word, we have biased views about middle-aged women (or some of younger mothers with children) and people grouped these women who do not working outside the house but doing full time parenting as just lazy ‘mothers’. I discern that we also see ajummas with similar biased views as the case of the word, motherism. Middle-aged women are grouped as ajummas and people dismiss all of them as a group of ajummas without understanding rather than seeing the particularity of each human being. So I would say that there is Ajumma-ism in Korea and I will explain about this later in this blog. (in a positive way)

 

Related URL links (haven’t researched much about motherism, yet so I will do more research and will post a blog entry about this very soon. (:

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/oct/21/motherisms-stay-at-home-mothers

https://www.macmillandictionary.com/buzzword/entries/motherism

https://www.ksl.com/?sid=29622015&nid=1009

The last post that I uploaded on this blog was last month. I had hectic days because of doing so many things and I had to finish them by middle of December this year. I’m writing some proposals, sending them to ‘them’, waiting for replies, finding another opportunities, keep sending proposals, etc. And do some part time teaching as well.

I haven’t finished some blog entires about ajummas and their usage of smartphones and they are stored in the draft box. I will bring them out to this blog very soon. (Maybe during the next week?)

Also I will reorganise this blog (put some new categories, deleted some useless categories etc.)

Now I can smell ‘winter’ in Seoul. ^__^

 

It’s been a while to upload posts on this blog. I was super busy but I know this is not enough to excuse my laziness. I will be uploading blog posts very soon so please keep visiting my blog.

I took this photo about 2 weeks ago. I found this photo is very interesting from my point of view because they took selfie of themselves by their own mobiles. They don’t know each other I guess and they look so busy of taking selfies. Now taking selfies are not only limited to the youth culture, rather everyone enjoy taking selfies to express themselves freely.