Seoul's Underground Canvas: Advertisements as a Mirror of Society — Epoche B2
One ordinary thing, watched for ninety minutes a day The subject of this essay is the advertising inside Seoul's subway carriages: the printed panels above the windows and the screens above the doors, and what can and cannot be inferred from them. I have a habit, when I travel, of picking one ordinary thing and paying it far more attention than it deserves, and in Seoul it turned out to be this — partly because I was spending ninety minutes a day underground, and partly because I could not read most of it, which forces you to look at how a thing is made rather than at what it says. Two registers in the same carriage Seoul's carriages carry advertising in two registers at once, and the contrast between them is where the argument starts. Above the windows hang the printed panels: rectangular, slightly out of date, held in aluminium frames. Above the doors and at the ends of the car sit liquid-crystal screens cycling through animated spots. The screens are newer and are gradually taking the business, but they are also easier to ignore, in the way that anything moving on a screen has become easy to ignore. The printed panels are still there because they are still there — the closest thing a subway car has to sediment. That is not merely a figure of speech, and it has a consequence for what follows. A screen slot is sold in seconds and can be re-let daily, so its contents track this week's campaigns. A frame is sold by the fortnight or the month and has to be physically changed by someone with a ladder, so its contents lag. If you want to know what advertisers thought a fortnight ago, read the frames; if you want to know what they think today, read the screens. Everything I counted below was in the frames, which means it is a slightly stale reading and should be treated as one. Line 3 under Daechi-dong: why the numerals are the whole argument On Line 3, between Daechi and Hangnyeoul, the panels are almost entirely hagwon advertising — private after-school academies — with the university admissions of last year's students set in numerals large enough to read from the far side of the carriage. This is not a coincidence of my route. Those two stations sit under Daechi-dong in Gangnam district, which holds the densest concentration of academies in the country, and the advertising is aimed at parents riding home at ten at night from the same district. The ten o'clock detail is not atmosphere; it is law. Academies in Korea operate under a statute governing private teaching institutes, under which each metropolitan authority sets permitted operating hours by ordinance, and Seoul's cut-off is 10 p.m. The evening emptying of Daechi-dong is therefore a scheduled event, and a media buyer knows to the minute when the target audience will be standing in a carriage with nothing to look at. Why numerals, though, and nothing else? One panel I passed most days consisted of a photograph of a lecture hall and a single line of figures — so many admitted to this university, so many to that one. The reason the figures can carry the whole pitch is that the thing being sold is a rank rather than a quantity of learning, and rank has a particular economic character. Fred Hirsch's term for goods of this kind is positional : goods whose value to the holder consists in having more of them than other people, so that a general increase in supply cancels itself out. University places at a given institution are fixed in number. If every household in Daechi-dong doubles its tutoring, the same number of children are admitted. What the panel therefore promises is not improvement but displacement, and displacement is naturally expressed as a count. The same logic explains why the panel bothers with last year's results at all rather than describing its teaching. Michael Spence's analysis of signalling, published in 1973, makes the general point: where quality cannot be observed directly, buyers rely on an observable that is systematically harder for the weaker seller to produce. A list of admissions is exactly that. It is not a description of the service; it is the one number a poor academy cannot easily fake. Michael Seth's history of Korean education fever supplies the rest of the context that the panel does not bother to give, because everyone reading it already knows it. Two things from that history are worth having in mind under Daechi-dong. The first is scale: the annual government survey of private education spending has recorded national household outlay above twenty-five trillion won, with something like four-fifths of school students taking part. The second is that this has repeatedly been fought over rather than accepted. Private tutoring was banned outright in 1980, and the ban was struck down by the Constitutional Court in 2000 as an excessive restriction on parents' right to educate their children. The panels above the windows are, in that sense, the visible surface of a settled legal question that was not settled for twenty years. Line 2: demography rendered as marketing Ride the loop line instead and the mixture changes. Line 2 through Gangnam and Samseong gave me dermatology and cosmetic surgery clinics, before-and-after jawlines, financing terms in small print; then investment apps promising commission-free trading; then, repeatedly, delivery services and small-portion meal kits. The last of these is the one that stayed with me, because it is demography rendered as marketing. Statistics Korea's census figures record single-person households climbing from under a tenth of all households around 1990 to roughly a quarter by 2010 and to about a third in the most recent register-based counts. That is not a marginal shift in living arrangements; it is a change in the modal unit that a food business must package for. And you can watch the advertising industry reorganising itself around it — one-person barbecue sets, subscription side dishes, a moving company whose entire pitch is that they will handle a studio flat in