
Why some Koreans make $10k a month to eat on camera - smalera
http://qz.com/592710/why-some-koreans-make-10000-a-month-to-eat-on-camera/
======
chippy
I didn't think the idea that Koreans were so plugged into the Internet that
they were replacing actual human contact with virtual dinners had much weight.
I suspect that people watch and donate because they enjoy it. They are
entertained.

It's the future of entertainment. We are seeing it in the West with Twitch.tv.
People donate to their favourite streamers and companies sponsor them.

I've been getting into watching and following various ARMA3 role play streams.
About a dozen streamers out of a couple hundred players will be interacting in
the online world with its own rules, laws and codes of behaviour and we as
audience get to see into the world through their eyes at the same time, get to
see the same event through the eyes of a gamer playing a policeman or a
gangster. It's essentially improvisational acting, and there's a huge
potential here for some great entertainment. I think that's what's new.

But what makes it the future is that it's interactive, there is a community.
The people on the other side of the stream interact back, sometimes directly
to you, and you can interact directly with them. This may not be new - but
it's new within this new field of entertainment, and I'm optimistic about it.

~~~
JimmyAustin
Do you have a link to the ARMA streams? They sound fascinating.

~~~
thinkdevcode
[http://www.twitch.tv/directory/game/ArmA%20III](http://www.twitch.tv/directory/game/ArmA%20III)

Usually the top streams in the Arma 3 directory are RP streams.

------
giarc
I have a family member who hates to watch people eat. It's not the social
aspect of eating together that she dislikes, it's the actual act of eating
that she doesn't like to observe. Therefore, if someone can dislike this act,
why can't the opposite be true and there exist people that like to watch
people eat?

------
junto
Sounds like a William Gibson novel! I give it a couple more years before an
example of "Idoru" comes along.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Idoru](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Idoru)

~~~
w1ntermute
Already happened in 2009 in Japan[0]:

> Hatsune Miku, a virtual singer whose voice is created by a software engine,
> performed "live" for the first time on Saturday at the Animelo Summer Live
> 2009 Re:bridge concert.

There are a lot of concert videos on YouTube[1].

0: [http://www.animenewsnetwork.com/news/2009-08-23/hatsune-
miku...](http://www.animenewsnetwork.com/news/2009-08-23/hatsune-miku-virtual-
idol-performs-live-before-25000)

1:
[https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=hatsune+miku+li...](https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=hatsune+miku+live)

~~~
jacquesm
It's funny to see an account called w1ntermute respond to a real life question
about a William Gibson character. Life imitating art commenting on life
imitating art :)

~~~
w1ntermute
I was not unaware of that amusing coincidence as I left the comment ;)

~~~
jacquesm
I suspected as much. So, what are you reading these days?

------
withdavidli
So Man vs Food webcam style? Or Epic Meal Time?
[https://www.youtube.com/user/EpicMealTime/videos](https://www.youtube.com/user/EpicMealTime/videos)

What's hard to get about people wanting to see others eat large amounts of
food. US had the glutton bowl and that guy who's famous for eating hotdogs.

------
melvinmt
Very interesting article but a bit of a weird ending:

" Which is another way of saying that I object to mukbang on classist grounds,
and am hard-wired to do so. There are very few excuses for bad table manners,
and being on video certainly isn’t one of them."

------
shalmanese
The way it's described in the article, it sounds more like ASMR [1] than
anything else. There's an active ASMR community in the West but it's largely
not centered around eating food. It doesn't seem out of the question that the
Korean ASMR community have developed a following around food.

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autonomous_sensory_meridian_re...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autonomous_sensory_meridian_response)

------
ape4
As the article points out, Korea has the world's fastest internet. And this is
how they use it ;)

------
michaelbuddy
Answer: because they are cute or in some cases funny.

