Dong-hee's TV uses satellite broadcasting which has more than 60 channels. As he turns on the TV, there is a news channel going on. He watches it for a while, and then changes to the home shopping channel. He watches people eating food in that channel, and after a few minutes, he decides to change to another channel again.

★ Flipper Generation 
    As people like Dong-hee are increasing worldwide, the word 'flipper-generation' has been created. The word flipper comes from verb 'flip.' It means people flip their TV channel as they flip book pages. They are nomads of the TV channel who can't finish one program, but are constantly moving from channel to channel every few seconds.
    This kind of nomad can be easily found in music, game, news, and almost everywhere. They decide whole things with the first few minutes. In case of music, the "hook song" was a great hit these days. Unlike the existing song, hook song is the song which starts with its high-light part to attract people in short time. Media news is trapped in a similar situation. Since there has been a great increase in the media news, people couldn't find time to read them all. Therefore, people click on media news, and reporters design their article using a pretext called "fishing article" which has such a surprising and interesting title despite being an insignificant story.

★ The reasons
    The most popular reason for the occurrence of flipper generation has been the speed of producing information that is way too fast compared to the speed of consuming it. With the abundance of information which is produced everyday, we have limited time. To make sure we obtain the perfect information for ourselves, they have to look at as many as possible in a short time. For that reason, the flipper generation tends to be moving "quickly" and "roughly."
    This situation resembles that of Korea's 'quickly quickly (bbali bbali)' culture in industrialization. Unlike quickly quickly culture in the course of Korea, the flipper generation's quickly quickly culture is a worldwide phenomenon. For example, the fastest media encyclopedia Wikipedia is a compound word of WikiWiki and encyclopedia. WikiWiki means 'quickly' in Hawaiian. 
    Like quickly quickly culture of Korea, WikiWiki culture of flipper generation does everything literally "quickly" and "roughly." As a result, there are tons of information produced everyday, but most of them are lack of quality.
    Another reason is mixed with the problems of youth. Youths these days often spend the richest time in their childhood compared to other generations. They can easily obtain whatever they need. They are definitely not familiar with waiting. Let's read part of the poem "If we can turn on and off love like a radio" written by Chang, Jung-il  
    All of us / Want to be love / To turn off when we want to turn off / Turn on when we want to turn on / Like a radio
    In this poem, you can find the young-generation's hope is that they want to simplify even love. They consider things valuable only when they can turn on and off when they want to.

★ Problems 
    Flipper generation encouraged the TV channels to use stimulating materials to attract people. More and more trash dramas are playing on TV, but they are getting top ratings. Not only is drama irritating, but also are news, books and every element of culture. The problem is that most of the flipper generation is made up of teenagers and those in their twenties. The youth got used to simple plots and stimulating materials. Teenagers and twenties in these days can't do many things that youths in their old time did and are afraid of complicated things. As a matter of fact, there have been more people who lack sociability and the ability to debate. Dare violence that happened to them is often are same. It occurred because of the misunderstanding that people have toward each other.

★ Over the Flipper-Generation 
    If we look at the existing point of view, as we talked, the flipper generation is a phenomenon which is full of problems. Thinking negatively about the flipper generation without reserve, however, is not right. Even though mass media enchants people with irritation, we should remember that there has been likewise a great increase in mass media. Also, the flipper generation birthed the multi-player. It is natural to have a tidal wave when wave after wave bumped into the next. Since this storm is only temporary and caused from two different waves, judging it with prejudice is not good. However, if we understand this wave's collision and accept it, it would help us to ride another wave easy.

By  Cho Eun-su  CP Reporter
ssu6013@cnu.ac.kr