![\"\"](\"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/01\/KB-Sebashi-1.png\")
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Come to live in South Korea, and you\u2019ll find that everything you used to use in the old country has a locally made equivalent in Korea. That goes not just for goods but for services, even \u2014 maybe especially \u2014 services on the internet. For nearly 20 years, Koreans have done most of their searching not on Google but on a portal site called\u00a0Naver<\/a>, which also offers its own, much more functional (in Korea, that is)\u00a0map application<\/a>. They look up restaurants not on Yelp but\u00a0Diningcode<\/a>, find apartments not on Craigslist or Zillow but\u00a0Zigbang<\/a>\u00a0or\u00a0Dabang<\/a>, and have long done their messaging through a service called\u00a0Kakaotalk<\/a>. Alongside\u00a0the Korean Wikipedia<\/a>\u00a0exists the jokier but often more detailed\u00a0Namuwiki<\/a>.<\/p>\n
Those named are hardly the only options, since each category with any potential user base at all tends to produce an abundance of Korean competitors, no single one of which ever seems to attain complete dominance. Apart from the government\u2019s reluctance to allow the release of detailed map data to foreign companies (ostensibly in the name of national security), this situation hasn\u2019t arisen, for the most part, as a matter of policy, but from the perceived need to address the supposedly unique expectations and problems of the Korean consumer, which itself might go all the way back to the exports-good-imports-bad developmental ideology of the 1960s and 70s. It has also given rise to a Korean equivalent of\u00a0TED Talks<\/a>, the series of short video lectures that for well over a decade have generated praise, criticism, and hundreds of millions of views.<\/p>\n
Korea\u2019s own TED Talks launched in 2011, calling itself\u00a0\u201cSebashi\u201d<\/a>\u00a0(\uc138\ubc14\uc2dc), a contraction of sesangeul bakkuneun shigan 15 bun<\/em>\u00a0(\uc138\uc0c1\uc744 \ubc14\uafb8\ub294 \uc2dc\uac04 15\ubd84), officially rendered in English as \u201cThe Fifteen Minutes that Changes the World.\u201d Most of its videos run over 15 minutes, some well over; however much its creators have copied from the TED Talk format, they haven\u2019t applied its famously rigid 18-minute limit. TED curator Chris Anderson has\u00a0justified that length<\/a>\u00a0as \u201clong enough to be serious and short enough to hold people\u2019s attention,\u201d with the added advantage of being \u201cthe length of a coffee break.\u201d Many a Korean office worker combines coffee break and cigarette break, meaning they take them outside, even during a chilly Seoul winter like this one.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n