South Korea’s “Information notification”s

So if you live in South Korea, you’ll notice that every now and then you’ll occasionally get a text from your phone that looks something like this:

And usually it’s pretty rare and easy to ignore— oftentimes it’ll be a weather warning, a fine dust warning, or something pretty useful. Recently, however, the government has been really liberal with their usage of the “information notification” feature. It’s a regional thing, too, so depending on what district you’re in you might get more or less messages, and it is very, very annoying after a while. It’s not just like any other text you might get, where it’s a simple buzz that takes up space in your notification tray— no, when you get the almighty special government notification, it quits you out of whatever application you’re in, renders the entire screen inactive, and forces you to acknowledge its presence by pressing “OK” or “view”. With COVID-19 going on it’s understandable that the local councils want to keep their citizens informed, but the rate at which you get interrupted can range from “occasional” to “mindnumbingly often”. 

I’ve learned to autopilot tap “OK” and move on in my life, but recently I’ve been curious as to exactly how often I’ve been getting these notifications. So, I took a dig through my phone’s text history and recorded the dates of every message I get. Doing this by hand took wayyyy longer than I had anticipated, but here’s what the messages-per-month distribution looks like:

A couple things to note before we start making any points: this is my personal message history, which means it is reflective of where I live (a pretty central part of Seoul) and the things I do (which includes going abroad and moving locations). This means that, for example, from 09/19-12/19 there are zero total messages because I was in the US and my Korean SIM card was offline. It also means that if I had, theoretically, gotten a message from one district earlier in the day about an incoming storm, then traveled to another district who warned me about the same storm later in the day, I would “double-dip” and thus it would be counted twice in my data. Additionally, I counted these pretty quickly and so there’s probably a +/- 10 on the larger counts (anything below 20 should be dead-on). 

So, what can we learn from this? First, messages were extremely infrequent before the pandemic, with only one month (08/18, during a severe typhoon season) reaching double digit messages. However, once the pandemic started, the floodgates opened. Here’s another graph, but it’s average messages per day for each month:

That’s a lot of messages daily. It wouldn’t be so bad if it was a normal text, but the fact that it closes out your application and forces you to recognize its existence does make it incredibly irritating when watching a YouTube video or doing something important (or that requires you to login again when exited). It’s very important, I admit, to communicate properly with the citizens about the ongoing pandemic (it’s literally a life and death situation), but the constant near-spam levels of text messages make it very hard for me to take these notifications seriously. 

The issue lies in how often I’m getting these messages— it feels like a routine, non-alarming thing, when it should indicate danger and for me to exercise caution. A message a day listing the number of newly infected people in my area is incredibly helpful and good for judging how bad an outbreak might be in my vicinity. However, sending three additional messages about tangential information regarding the usage of indoor gyms slightly changing policy is not something that everybody needs to urgently know. 

The key issue is that it makes public health communications feel commonplace. Even though I’m a public health major and I take COVID-19 seriously, I will 80% of the time just press “OK” and swipe the text without reading it because 1) it usually doesn’t apply to me and 2) it happens too often for me to really care. There was one particular class in PHP0320 (Intro to Public Health) with Joseph Wendelken, a guest lecturer who is the Public Information Officer for the Rhode Island Department of Health. He said that for public health communication, you need to be first, be right, and be credible. The messages definitely hit the first one on the nail, but perhaps a bit too hard— and consequently harming the other two criterion. The consistency of significance and applicability of the messages is far too sporadic for an average person to read any one particular text deeply (it’s usually around 2-3 sentences with a link attached), and the daily barrage that happens is not exactly a pleasant experience (though one that I’ve grown accustomed to). 
And finally, one curiosity: mapping the COVID-19 portion of my previous graph onto the cases per month (per SK government). Does a surge of cases increase messaging, or does a downward trend in cases decrease notifications? 

Nope. Nothing really substantial to look at here, except that the pandemic has gotten worse over time. I suppose there was a bit of a downwards trend during the three month period of August to October, but it seems like the government’s communication team is very sensitive to any upward movement in cases— the spike from July to August and November to December seems to suggest that. Maybe there’s a “lag” between reacting to dwindling cases and allowing fewer messages, as people want to continue communicating until they’re sure that they don’t need to send more messages. Conversely, they are very quick to react to an uptick in cases, as a spike in cases always results in a gigantic spike in messages sent. 

Ultimately, I think this post just highlights how often these messages are coming through on a daily basis, and how the sheer number of notifications shoved into your face on a daily basis waters down the real important announcements that are being made via this communication channel. The thing is, it’s a really good tool to catch people’s attention about the pandemic— but overuse of it, I believe, has really numbed down its effectiveness. Unfortunately, a large part of it isn’t the fault of the government, but the inherent length of time that we’ve been in lockdown mode. After six months, people just stop listening, and that includes me, despite my best efforts to try. I was super engaged in the pandemic early on— I would look at the John Hopkins page everyday and read up on the latest developments. But after a while, it all kinda blurs together, and at this point, I really, really don’t care about changing from Stage 2 to 1.5— I’m gonna stay mostly indoors until the vaccination campaign rolls out, regardless.