How Dark Academia became one of the pandemic s fastest growing internet trends newstatesman.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from newstatesman.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
0 May 25, 2021 23:52 by Anjola Alabi
Victoria Trieber
As we are in the swing of deadline season, stress levels are rising as we chase the deadlines. Whilst this productivity is helpful, social media has become another source of stress through the promotion of hustle culture. More and more people promoting dedicating every minute of the day to productivity and selecting images to project an aura of perfection on Instagram. However, this is proving to be harmful to our mental health.
The pressure for a side hustle is at its height, with the start of the pandemic having brought on a new wave of social media encouragement to spend the quarantine period being productive.
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.