Subject
- #Living in the US
Created: 1 days ago
Created: 2025-10-22 07:16
At this point, having lived in Korea for more years, but now over 18 years into my life in the U.S. -
I suddenly think about the relationship between my identity and online activities.
I've changed my nationality, but I love the United States so much. There are things I like simply from daily life, (the biggest example is a nature-friendly life) and even from the perspective of someone who handles computers well compared to the average person, I'm living a more convenient life than in Korea.
The biggest difference is that things like the public certificate (공인인증서) that I know only exist in Korea are not needed at all in the U.S. When opening online banking and when money is exchanged for shopping or utility bills online, nothing else is ever required.
If you're paying with a card, you just need to enter your name and card information correctly, and when paying with a check, you just need to enter the bank's routing number and account number shown on the check along with your name correctly. Moreover, since we're talking about checks, deposits can be made easily and conveniently with a mobile app.
And in the case of websites, Korean portal sites like Naver or Daum are a bit uncomfortable to look at, and my eyes get tired easily, as a visually impaired person, but even just connecting to Yahoo.com, the letters are mostly large, making them much less burdensome to read. Still, Korea is better than Japan.
Actually, I quit Threads recently, and the biggest reason was that the views were so miserable no matter how hard I wrote. I don't know what the cause is, but over the past two years, I've had many opportunities to write in my native Korean, which was the opposite of my initial plan, so the feed was mainly in Korean.
But the problem was that when something happened in Korea (for example, martial law or the recent KakaoTalk update), the feed was filled with these stories, and it was overwhelming to watch. Ah~ I thought this was information pollution~, so I thought that there was no other way but to cut it off.
On the other hand, I haven't seen English-speaking users write with as much sincerity as Koreans, so the views and reactions to my English posts on Threads are really miserable compared to Korean. The same goes for Japanese. So, I realized that putting effort into something meaningless is like shouting into a wall or into the void.
So the place I finally returned to is the blog, and durumis. This place doesn't care about comments or views. It doesn't care or even know whether people read my posts a lot or not. Moreover, this place is said to be translated into 16 languages, so my posts might be seen somewhere in the world I didn't even expect.
And I started Instagram stories a few months ago, and actually, comparing this Instagram to Threads, I thought that Threads was just garbage. Of course, you have to put photos to post on Instagram, but if you want to upload just text to Insta stories, you can write it in a notepad and capture it to upload.
Come to think of it, all the SNS I'm using are made in the U.S. (?). Blogs are Naver, durumis, Medium, LiveDoor, and recently, Note. I'm barely surviving and operating them, according to each language. And as I write down my thoughts like this, I can only conclude that the United States is the true IT powerhouse. Korea's level, whether it's AI or this recent fire, has to be compared to a baby who has just taken their first steps.
So, although I'm lacking, I'm self-studying coding and computer science as a hobby, and if possible, I'm learning and making it my own from what people in the U.S. teach me. Since I use the computer and the phone in English anyway, the reality is that I can't even understand what Korean teachers teach me.
I hope I finish the CSS final project on the FCC YouTube channel this week well.
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