May is the “month of family” or on a more corporeal level, the “month of gifts” in Korea.
There’s the children’s day on May 5, mother’s day on May 8, and teachers’ day on May 15.

With the typical “gift giving culture,” May gets a little crazy for everyone trying to find suitable presents - imagine the life of a 32 year old person. You need to buy presents for your parents and grand parents, your children, your children’s teachers, and your own teachers (past and present if you’re still in contact), your nieces and nephews… perhaps May deserves a title like “the month of hemorrhage.”

KTF is offering a special “txting filial piety” service to “create a space of communication with parents” for many users who are often “too shy” to express their feelings and gratitude (see the original newswire article here - in Korean). This particular service has two sub-categories:

1. Free filial piety MMS alarm service
   The user can subscribe to this free service and receive an MMS on their phone every morning. The content of the message itself is something along the lines of “I love you” and “Thank you.” The user can then send on that message to their parent/s. KTF claims that this will also have a positive effect of allowing the parents to become more familiarised with the technology of txting - something that their demographics don’t normally use.
2. Txt music and background decoration service
   As long as the user includes one of these words - “mother,” “father,” “mum,” or “dad” - in a txt and add * at the end of the receipient’s phone number, suitable music and background image (according to those terms) will be automatically inserted, turning a simple txt message into a more emotive MMS message. I’m assuming that there are other available terms, though I’m having trouble viewing content on the KTF website at the moment (I’m on a Mac using Safari and Firefox).

I kind of like these clever ideas. They’re quite lovely. And it’s very interesting how the free filial piety alarms are sent to the user, not the user’s parents, which means the user will need to pay to forward them on to their parent/s. I guess this prevents the messages from turning into spams; this 2005 article reports that 95.8 per cent of Korean cell phone users have received advertisements on their handsets, and 41.8 per cent of the survey respondents reported that they receive spam messages once or twice a week. The numbers undoubtedly have increased since then.

My mother doesn’t bother at all with smss as she knows that all she’s getting is either spam or some sort of notification that she’s already aware of anyway. So although the first few “I love you; thank you” messages may be lovely and touching, the whole idea might lose its charm within a few days and become absolutely annoying instead. And another interesting aspect of this is that forwarding the MMS everyday will incur financial commitment from the user. So it’s a “legitimate gift” with financial involvement.

I think very soon - probably tomorrow - I should get some of those “legitimate gifts” to send my own parents too, in a manner that’s slightly slower than MMS or 100mb broadband, but with genuine love and thanks :)

This entry was posted on Thursday, May 3rd, 2007 at 2:18 pm and is filed under korea, technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.