February 15, 2021
A screenshot from the popular gongbang video channel “The man sitting next to me”.
Screengrab/YouTube/The man sitting next to me(study with me)
The YouTube video zooms in on a South Korean girl studying at a table, intently focused on her assignment while accompanied by the stark sounds of turning pages and the scratching of pencil on paper.
The video is part of a bizarre internet trend in South Korea called
gongbang , or “study broadcast” – people broadcasting themselves studying in almost total silence for hours on end.
Many South Korean students study up to 16 hours a day to prepare for their gruelling college or university entrance examinations, and the video trend is believed to have started after a Korean student filmed himself poring over his schoolbooks so that his parents could see he was diligently preparing.