Watch others eat? Forget it! New trend in Korea (5 photos + 1 video)

Mukbang, probably everyone has seen at least once how a blogger eats on camera, and thousands of people watch it. What is the reason for this phenomenon is not clear to me, but Asians are having a blast. And now the new trend of group viewing in South Korea is everyone watching others study hard for hours.





Many students and graduates broadcast how they pore over a textbook for five hours straight, and people watch it enthusiastically. In essence, a person sits in silence, reads, turns over the pages of a textbook, and sometimes writes something down.



I don’t watch mukbang, I want to give bream for eating like a pig. It's infuriating!

This new type of video is called gongbang.

The leader of this genre is the Korean streamer Vot No Jem, who can study for seven hours straight.

What is the phenomenon of gongbang?

This genre was originally born as a “video for parents.” Asian parents are known to be very pushy and demanding. And powerless to prove that they were trying their best, students simply turned on an online broadcast of themselves studying in the library.





There are also built-in widgets so that there is a training timer and how much is left. True views 0

So that mom can turn on at any time that her useless son is trying. Stop scolding him!

Suddenly, not only mothers began to watch such broadcasts. Other students began to look to hard-working students to motivate themselves. Because many students study 18 hours a day before exams.

I myself tried very hard to prepare for exams at the University, but 18 hours a day is some kind of hopeless darkness, you can’t live like that. Where do you get the moral strength for such a feat?



And here is a video with a timer from a girl. Girls film themselves when they study, not even the table))

Watching that others can learn like this - right now, live - is very stimulating. It looks very much like South Korean students are simply being collectively held hostage by the current brutal system.

And together this stress and pressure is somehow psychologically easier to cope with.

In the past years, approximately 8,000 Gongbang videos have been uploaded to YouTube, and the number is growing every day.



Every time I read about a Korean school, I thank fate that I was not born in Korea and did not go to school there

In general, there is a feeling that the popularity of both mukbang (videos of gluttony) and gongbang (videos of studying) is not due to the moral health of the nation. But because people are lonely and under enormous pressure. Or maybe I’m behind the trends, and all our students are already doing this too?

Or maybe you think it’s a good trend to watch others learn and get motivated yourself?