Courtesy of Tim Mossholder

Eunbi Ko and David A. Tizzard

A professor recently asked me if I have a “bu-gae” on my Instagram. The answer was obvious: “Yes, of course!” I paused for a minute though. First I was worried that he might ask what my ID was. No way he was getting that. Then I was curious how he even knew about such things. Weird!

The term bu-gae refers to one’s secondary social media account. It’s not the one that the whole world can see but rather a more private one. One kept for only our closest friends but generally not our family. And certainly not professors, co-workers, or the many acquaintances we have to make in our day-to-day lives.

Of course we are always told how old people grew up with less regard for privacy: their names and addresses published in a big telephone book for the whole neighborhood to see. But we’re different. We value our digital identity because, in a way, it reflects who we are.

But is the second account really the fake account? Originally, we create it as the equivalent of a burner. One for our day-to-day lives, filled with shopping, coffee, drinking, and everything else that happens in between the moments our coworkers see. But as time goes by, the lines get blurred. The real becomes fake and the fake becomes real. We are pressured into playing roles and adopting masks. Eventually, we start uploading the “reality” of their daily lives, unfiltered, to our second account rather than to the bon-gae (the main account).

While this trend is clearly global, most young Koreans have secondary accounts on their social media. And it is generally a sign of youth. Old people, for example, generally have one Facebook account or one Instagram account. They do not have multiple accounts on the same platform for different people to access. But because we’re online so........

© The Korea Times